Hey Roonies!
 

I am going to trial Roon and am looking for recommendations on how to configure the SW for best performance. Here’s what I have to work with:

Win 10 desktop PC. i3 uP, 8G of ram, plenty of HDD space.

Synology DS 1819+ Atom C3538 4G ram. 4 8TB drives in Raid

Endpoint(s)
MS SurfacePro3 i7 2.4G 8G ram 500G hdd

MS SurfacePro10 i5 1.5G 8G ram 250G ssd

Remote(s)
Old iPad

Whichever SurfacePro doesn’t get used as an endpoint


Thoughts?

Are you going to use the Surface Pro internal speakers ?

Surface Pro on batteries, USB to DAC

Tom, the main thing is to get started with Roon. Then once you get the feel for it and evaluate the usefulness, I am sure you will be looking at all kinds of ways to upgrade the streaming experience. :D

Thanks Serge - I have some ideas on how I’ll configure it so I guess like most SW I’ll just mess with it until I like it.

Yes, just get it running on whichever device and have fun with it. After that, we can collectively start to spend your money. :lmao:

Tom...

I installed Roon a couple of years ago and have subscribed to Quobuz recently which is linked to Roon. It's an eye opener! Here's my 2 cents worth.

Use the Surface Pro with the larger amount of RAM as your endpoint.

- Have all music stored on the Synology.

- When Roon is searching your NAS for all the music just leave it alone to do it's thing. Depending on how files are in the NAS this could take some time.

- Make a main folder for Music, then 2 or 3 sub folders. Folders more than one level down past Music don't always get picked up by Roon's initial directory search. You can have as many folders under each of the sub folders as you want.

Roon will monitor those first level folders for new music added to them.

So here are a few examples:

- NAS\01 FLAC\as many folders as you want.

- NAS\02 New Music\as many folders as you want

- NAS\03 Xmas Music\as many folders as you want

There's more on setting up Roon at the link below. Hopefully it is of some help.

https://www.audioaficionado.org/show...t=roon+diaries

Have fun!

A few things to consider:
You should have a solid state drive, a good processor (preferably 64 bit), and an Ethernet connection to run the Roon core. If the desktop has that, that’s the starting point to install Roon core.

The Surface with the SSD drive could also work as the server, but you should connect it via Ethernet. Endpoints work fine via wifi, but the server will perform best with an Ethernet connection.

The Synology can also be the server. It has enough ram, and the processor should be ok if you’re not running a lot of DSP. You’d want to install an SSD drive in one of the slots.

I'll just say that I think it works best if you have a dedicated machine for the server, or better yet one running the Roon OS.

But for evaluation purposes, that's not necessary. If you decide to go all the way with roon, you'll want a dedicated roon server for best reliability/performance.

What he said[emoji106]. A Roon Nucleus, a SonicTransporter, or something similar.