Roon - lifetime vs yearly

Discussion in 'Computer Audiophile: Software, Configs, Tools' started by cizx.6, Apr 8, 2017.

?

Which Roon model is wisest

  1. Yearly. This shit won't last long enough.

    9 vote(s)
    15.3%
  2. Lifetime. It'll outlive me.

    22 vote(s)
    37.3%
  3. I use jriver / foobar2000 / Audirvana / Bullshit Player X

    24 vote(s)
    40.7%
  4. Computers are for geeks

    4 vote(s)
    6.8%
  1. cizx.6

    cizx.6 Just couldn't stay away...

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    What's the consensus? Lifetime or yearly?

    I used foobar for years, but haven't found a good player on Mac since I switched. They all have drawbacks. Even foobar forced some sacrifices. Roon seems to be pretty close to the best.
     
  2. Mr Rick

    Mr Rick Acquaintance

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    If / when I want Roon I'll get an ELAC DS-S101 server. It includes a lifetime sub to Roon.
     
  3. Torq

    Torq MOT: Headphone.com

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    I'm in the lifetime subscription group.

    There's really nothing else out there that does what Roon does, let alone does it as well. It's not just a music player - and makes a lot less sense, price-wise, if it's viewed as one than if you consider the whole scope of what it does.

    If you're a music-first type (rather than gear-first), the exploration, metadata, discovery and library insight functionality is untouched by anything else I know of. And if you have any kind of distributed/multi-room audio desires then there simply isn't a better client or controller for that that I'm aware of. Whether it's running on my desktop and directly addressing a DAC there, feeding my Aries units, driving Sonos, or providing a "doesn't terminally suck" interface over TIDAL (and, at the same time, letting me treat my TIDAL and local collections as a a common resource), I've found it hard to go back to things like J-River or Audirvana.

    And then hardware support has built VERY quickly ... it only ran on Macs and PCs when I first started using it. Today, it runs on almost everything (and if it doesn't, it's probably because that manufacturer is being spiky about it). Couple it with a little RPi build and you have a nice, isolated, network streamer with a interface than none of the open-source players even gets close to.
     
  4. Kattefjaes

    Kattefjaes Mostly Harmless

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    No it doesn't, it gives you an embedded license for "Roon Essentials", a cut-down version. It also has a 30,000 file limit, which is exceedingly lame.

    Edit: Bullshit Player X is the best, wouldn't use anything else!
     
    Last edited: Apr 8, 2017
  5. cizx.6

    cizx.6 Just couldn't stay away...

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    @Torq that's pretty much what I'm seeing. I picked up an Aries LE and it's phenomenal with Roon.

    I was using a synology DS1513+ as a server but was getting dropouts here and there. Synology insists on using low performance / low power CPUs that don't work well for transcoding Plex, but I figured it'd be enough for music... nope. So, I moved the core to my hackintosh w/ a Xeon.. that seems to be okay. If Syno ups their CPU game with the upcoming 17+ models, I'll try that again. I like having an all in one. I haven't even considered dedicated players like ELAC...

    I might pick up a Libratone Zipp for the bathroom, since its Airplay and should work as an endpoint.

    I guess I'm talking myself into lifetime.
     
  6. Changeling

    Changeling Tube Slut

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    I'm on yearly. I love Roon, but they have to provide vst support before I'm in for life.
     
  7. Kattefjaes

    Kattefjaes Mostly Harmless

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    I'm curious, what are you doing with audio that needs actual CPU time? I have a little DS216J, and I can saturate the NIC without it running out of CPU grunt. I'd assume you're not transcoding audio with the NAS, but just streaming lossless files from it- so are you sure it's the CPU that's redlining, rather than Wifi slowing down or somesuch?

    If you look at the resource monitor on the NAS, is the CPU or RAM actually topping out? Is it some other process causing issues?

    Sorry, that's a lot of questions.. but I find mine can push 100MB/sec or so over the network without being too stressed, over CIFS. Heck, Bubbleserver running on it to turn UnPnP targets into OpenHome targets doesn't seem to upset it either, for more normal rate audio streaming.
     
  8. msommers

    msommers High on Epipens

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    Do they ever supply coupon codes? The yearly price is hard to swallow at the US-CAD exchange these days :(
     
  9. cizx.6

    cizx.6 Just couldn't stay away...

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    Yeah... those are good questions. CPU was definitely close to max. RAM was fine, network was fine.

    Roon is doing it. I'm not 100% sure WHAT it's doing...I didn't test if the dropouts were with volume leveling on (which could plausibly be a contributing factor, since Roon does some bit depth conversion in real time- source to 64bit, volume leveling, reduce to 24bit), or if there was anything else happening at the time. I really only do file sharing and backup tasks on that box. Roon actually recommends a minimum i3 CPU. Synology uses an Atom in this box.
     
  10. jhaider

    jhaider Acquaintance

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    I thought so too. And then I checked how many music files I actually have. Surprisingly, over 800GB in lossless music is ~29,200 files. So a 30,000 file limit doesn't sound unreasonable.
     
  11. Kattefjaes

    Kattefjaes Mostly Harmless

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    @cizx.6 - Oh, so you run some Roon stuff on your NAS, and it does all the audio processing on there? You'll have to forgive my ignorance, as I use Bullshit Player X and just have my NAS stream the audio, mostly.
     
  12. cizx.6

    cizx.6 Just couldn't stay away...

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    Yeah, I had the Synology version of Roon core running. Now I just use the Synology to store files and use my Hackintosh as the core. Not ideal, but working.
     
  13. cizx.6

    cizx.6 Just couldn't stay away...

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    It's a bit unreasonable. :)

    [​IMG]
     
  14. Kattefjaes

    Kattefjaes Mostly Harmless

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    Gotcha, makes perfect sense. I suppose the lowest-friction route for people doing it from scratch is to install Roon Server on a fairly minimal Linux box. You could put together a quiet or even passively cooled small form factor i3 or something for it, run it headless (maybe with Debian server or Ubuntu server, assuming it doesn't need X11?). That'd let you reclaim your Hackintosh for other evil purposes.

    If you're comfortable with a setup like that and SSHing in occasionally doesn't bring you out in hives, it could be pretty decent. I'm guessing you'd be OK, given that you've been through all the hassle of making a Hackintosh successfully already.

    (Edit: How noisy is an i3 Intel NUC? I guess it doesn't matter if it's in another room, anyway. That'd be pretty neat and tidy, mostly pre-built.)
     
    Last edited: Apr 8, 2017
  15. cizx.6

    cizx.6 Just couldn't stay away...

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    My Hackintosh is a quad Xeon w/ 32bg of RAM.. it runs Roon, VMware Fusion, Kodi, and still lets me do anything else without noticeable slowdown, so no need to reclaim it.

    I have a passively cooled celeron box that I used to run mpd on, but I don't think it's much faster than the atom. It's running windows 10 now, just for cuetools and foobar tagging stuff. I've used NUCs before, but they're overkill for this stuff. Not that noisy, but that wouldn't matter since it'd be in a closet with the synology.

    I need to cycle out my NAS disks as they're getting close to the 5 year mark, so I figure it's a good time to upgrade to the new Synology or a QNAP.
     
  16. cizx.6

    cizx.6 Just couldn't stay away...

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  17. strangecargo

    strangecargo Acquaintance

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    I went with the lifetime license after using Roon for a few hours, for basically all the reasons that @Torq stated. Before that, I was using the UX horrorshow that was JRiver MC and all the DLNA crap involved with making that work. I keep ~38,000 tracks on a QNAP TVS-1271U-RP NAS appliance and run the core in an ESXi VM, attached to the NAS over 10Gbe. I give the core VM 4 vCPUs and 8GB ram, which are both more than it seems to need, but the host is undersubscribed, so I have resources to spare.

    As an aside, if your music storage is on spinning disks and you keep them in the same room as your loudspeakers, try to keep a little distance between the two. Spinning disks don't like loud noises/vibration.
     
  18. pedalhead

    pedalhead Friend

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    From my experience, something like a NUC with a fast internal drive (eg NVME) and music library on a locally attached USB3 disk is the way to go for performance and robustness with Roon. Far better than a NAS/remote core setup (in fact, I started a thread to that effect... https://community.roonlabs.com/t/ditched-the-nas-gone-back-to-local-storage/12006). Currently mine's a Windows box, but I'm looking forward to ROCK (a turnkey, lightweight, roon-specific linux install due for release soon).

    Again, @Torq is spot on with his comments imho and very much echos my own reasons for totally falling for Roon almost immediately. Version 1.3 fulfilled most of my outstanding wish list, most importantly a native parametric equaliser, meaning I've finally ditched the fussy and unreliable HQPlayer for my EQ'd to death HD800.
     
  19. cizx.6

    cizx.6 Just couldn't stay away...

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    you think a USB drive is better than a NAS in any respect? k.
     
  20. pedalhead

    pedalhead Friend

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    From a performance point of view with Roon, there was a clear improvement when migrating from a Synology NAS box with an i7 laptop as core to an i5 NUC with locally attached USB3 drive. Obviously the NAS has benefits in other areas, but for Roon the NUC was the clear winner for me.
     

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