I've been using Roon audio software now for several years. I wanted to document my journey with it. It hasn't been a perfectly smooth ride, but I know there may be others who use this on an older computer at home and if this is helpful, great.
Christmas 2015 I got a decked-out iMac. It was one of their 5K models, with the high-res screen, the fastest you could buy at the time, at 4Ghz with an Intel i7 quad-core chip and 16GB RAM. It was my workhorse machine at home until recently. I ran Roon on the machine as the core as it was always on.
So for those of you not familiar, Roon is softare that runs on your home network. For someone like myself it means that I can use one platform to listen to music everywhere. There are many ways to do this now, and part of the equation is what kind of devices you have, what kind of network, and how you keep a collection of music.
When I moved into this house there were multiple Sonos amps already installed, driving built-in speakers in three rooms. I have since disconnected two of these but still use the dining room speakers. To play music I used Sonos' app on my phone. It worked with iTunes on my Mac and phone and it was a pretty easy to use networked system. As some cloud-based streaming services came online, they were working to integrate these.
I finally bit the bug and got a network streaming device to connect to my primary hifi setup. I still have the Auralic Aries now in my home office which is in turn connected to a DAC/integrated amp. My 1996-era B&W bookshelf speakers are still going strong on this system. Auralic had their own streaming platform that allowed me to reference my ripped music collection sitting on a Synology NAS. But when I replaced my Auralic in the main system, my new DAC needed an updated solution.
At some point I started using Roon after some strong preferences for it from John Darko of Darkoaudio. Roon was great: it would allow me to use my ripped music, it would talk to Sonos, and it would talk to the Auralic streamer. I could even stream the music to my phone or iPad.
The main system now runs on a PS Audio DirectStream DAC which includes a Bridge card that is another streamer. And when I retired the iMac with a new MacBook Pro, I kept it in the network closet to keep running Roon.
But then I was starting to get hiccups and some issues where Roon wasn't running as smoothly as possible. My next move was to relocate the iMac "server" to the room where the main system is. I also tried listening with USB directly going to the DAC rather than over Ethernet.
I still had some issues with what appeaered to be memory leaks - into Roon 2.0. Ater 4-5 days, I'd have to restart Roon or the computer. This wasn't ideal.
My collection in Roon has grown considerably, too; my collection is over 50% filled with Qobuz tracks, the one streaming service I use most often due to its hi-res files and great classical selection.
When I had some streaming cut outs (or also from my own collection in-house with the NAS), often the memory use of the Roon app was high (>4.5GB, upwards to 6 at times). I would notice a potential issue with spotlight. This is Apple's indexing program that scours the drive often for indexing files for searching. When it's doing it can tax the computer the processes would jump over into first place. I'd then disabled it all which means you can't search anymore, but really, the iMac is really being used with the screen off. It was okay.
As of January 2023, folks have suggested my computer may be the culprit, because of a slow drive, the use of wifi, or other suggestions which didn't make sense. I have wifi turned off and the drive is a still decent SSD, not Apple's fusion drive. I'd by this time retired my old account on the computer and created a bare-bones Roon account that doesn't do much. Logs indicated there were some network communications issues.
So I've set my DNS at home, to Roon's suggestion to Cloudflare and Google, which I'd used in the past and was familiar with. I also didn't realize you could run a headless version of Roon called Roon Server on Linux/Windows/Mac. It isn't quite the RoonOS that is on their Nucleus, but it does use less resources.
So far, so good. It started using 128-140% CPU time and took up over 4GB of RAM, which was typical for running the full Roon app. Then it settled down and is sitting now at 4-6% CPU with 2.17GB RAM. I've never seen the RAM usage go down after climbing before. These are positive signs.
On my MacBook which is remote-controlling the music, I see 8.2% CPU and 1GB RAM (MacBook Pro with M1Pro, 32GB). On the laptop music is routed to the Topping DX5 DAC/headphone amp.
RoonARC is also something interesting that came with Roon 2.0. It promised to make your music stream-capable outside your home. The idea was that I could ride in the car and be pulling music from my home server. This often didn't work for me.
I had to change the port # as some other appliance at home was using the same port #. Somehow the software opens the port on my FIOS router automagically. Then I got it to work. And most recently, they've added support for Carplay. I'm excited to try that out this weekend.
The best part of Roon is having the ability to treat all my music under one big library umbrella as a unified library, no matter the source. I think if it worked with more than Tidal and Qobuz it would be more useful; who knows, I might find Apple Music Classical compelling when it comes out of private testing.
Other options for running Roon include running their dedicated Linux platform and converting a small mini-computer like an Intel NUC into a RoonOS computer—it simply launches the server software once you turn it on and works headlessly. They also sell a machine called the Nucleus that runs this OS. I think the price for this is a tad high, especially when a NUC can go for about $700.
I personally would probably elect to run it on a Mac Mini if I went that route in the future, just because I'm entrenched in an Apple ecosystem.
In short, I've been a Roon user now for several years and it's grown with me as my use cases have increased and broadened. It's powerful in its ability to unify music stored on a local server alongside my streaming platform of choice. It can send music over the network to a variety of computers, mobile computers, and audio appliances that take streaming content. Look for stramers that are Roon-ready, meaning they are certified by the company to work well with their platform.
