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.