It seems it’s the second time this week that Roon is have trouble with their systems. I’m playing Bob Dylan’s Desire as we speak over Tidal and Roon, but I’m reading lots of articles about an outage. I also can’t reach their knowledge base.
I’ve just read it’s due to a Google Cloud Platform outage. Let’s hope things get fixed soon.
About a month ago I tried out Roon on the fastest NUC I had, a 6th generation i5. Not exactly a recent machine. It had 32GB memory and a 256GB M.2 hard drive.
I downloaded Roon ROCK, the Roon distribution specifically made for the NUC and burnt it to a USB stick. In less than 15 minutes Roon was up and running. Quite a small and quick install indeed. It immediately noticed the Bluesound Node2i and Naim Mu So QB Gen 2 on the network.
After reformatting a two drive Synology I put all my music on there and configured it as a source in Roon.
Then I ran downstairs to check out the sound. The audio systems I have aren’t anything special, so I mostly enjoyed the ease of use of the Roon app on my iPad.
Just when my trial was up I came to the conclusion I couldn’t miss that little old NUC as a server, so I ended the trial.
Then followed two weeks of missing the convenience of Roon. I had gotten used to sitting on my couch in the evening with a good glass of wine, going back in time and listening to a lot of music I loved, but had forgotten.
So I ordered an eighth generation NUC with an i7, 32GB of memory and the fastest 500GB M.2 drive I could find. It’s overkill, the 500GB and 32GB, but better safe than sorry. ROCK must do caching, right? It’s running on Linux after all.
When the parts arrived I put them together and immediately ordered a year’s subscription to Roon.
I can’t say it’s all running flawlessly. The iOS apps are the biggest problem. The iPhone app crashes quite often and it lacks a lot of features the iPad app has. The macOS app is brilliant though.
One day when I was listening the music just stopped and the Roon Core seemed to be unreachable. I could reach its web server and restart it, but that hasn’t happened again. Ever since the latest update it’s been clear sailing. Not for all though. There are a lot of articles on the Roon community site about Roon breaking its connection with Qobuz and Tidal.