So I Tried Out Roon Tonight...

prime minister

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And if kinda, sorta worked. I put it on my old MacBook Pro, it found all of my music, it connected to Tidal, it downloaded all of my Tidal favorites, my Tidal history, etc. It would not, however, play any songs from Tidal. It would play songs from my hard drive, but they all sounded like 10 year old MP3's.

I think I have some more work to do.
 
I just started using Roon and Tidal a couple of weeks ago. I love it. I still stream it through my Sonos but the quality of the Tidal files is so much better than Spotify. I had no issues getting it to find and play all of my music. How old is the Mac Book pro? I have a fairly new iMac with the latest OS. Plenty of memory and storage.
 
Do you have a firewall on the laptop. May need to allow roon access to the world outside your local network.
 
And it fixed itself overnight. In the motmorn, Tidal worked, and it sounded better. Decent sound, not great. My cd player, feeding into the same DAC, sounds dramatically better. So in guessing I'm not all the way there yet.

My thought is to get a small and quiet, but strong, computer, fill a USB drive with my cd rips, and start fresh. Tuck it down on the bottom shelf of my rack, and bobs your uncle.
 
I haven't made the leap to Rune yet. I'm still getting by quite nicely with Logitech Media Server + SqueezeLite, but it's on my long-term plans.
 
My thought is to get a small and quiet, but strong, computer, fill a USB drive with my cd rips, and start fresh. Tuck it down on the bottom shelf of my rack, and bobs your uncle.

You can remote-control Roon from an ipad, right?

I still say the easiest route is BlueSound or something similar. My audio life changed the day I ditched my computer setup and bought a set of streaming components made for the task. But...I haven't done the Roon thing, and have heard it's better than Audirvana and Decibel, which I was using.
 
All the computer tweaks sound too complicated for me so I settled with Lightning DS with Auralic. I haven’t tried Roon but the snippets of comparison reviews I saw suggest to me the difference is negligible.
 
You can remote-control Roon from an ipad, right?

I still say the easiest route is BlueSound or something similar. My audio life changed the day I ditched my computer setup and bought a set of streaming components made for the task. But...I haven't done the Roon thing, and have heard it's better than Audirvana and Decibel, which I was using.

Yeah. That's how I ran it yesterday. The iPad app was a piece of cake. Set itself up and was up and running in literally minutes.

I've had so little success with computer audio, that I'm nervous to drop Bluesound money into it from the start. This is a test. If I can have fun with this, and play lots of music, then I'll see where I go next.
 
All the computer tweaks sound too complicated for me so I settled with Lightning DS with Auralic. I haven’t tried Roon but the snippets of comparison reviews I saw suggest to me the difference is negligible.

What's a Lightning DS with Auralic?

Roon doesn't sound great yet in my setup. Good, but not great.
 
So Roon is still working. If I sound surprised, it's because I am. This seems to be some really nice, well thought out software. Who'd have thunk that was possible.
 
Sounds interesting but trying to wrap my mind around the $5**.00 one time membership which is better than $120 annually... Is there really no other software that does this in a similar layout and playback quality? (Full disclosure;my last digital attempt involved windows media player)
 
Sounds interesting but trying to wrap my mind around the $5**.00 one time membership which is better than $120 annually... Is there really no other software that does this in a similar layout and playback quality? (Full disclosure;my last digital attempt involved windows media player)

It makes sense indeed.

And I've tried various ways to get music through a computer. Roon is by far the best, from what I have seen so far.
 
Sounds interesting but trying to wrap my mind around the $5**.00 one time membership which is better than $120 annually... Is there really no other software that does this in a similar layout and playback quality? (Full disclosure;my last digital attempt involved windows media player)
The playback quality I would guess is a subjective judgement - there's a few good players out there I think. I've only used Roon a couple times, but they seem to have developed an interesting system , with some flexibility among various OS's. Not to mention the extensive metadata, which needs maintenance and a cash flow to support that.

I'm really trying to avoid Roon, afraid that I'd like it too much. This thread isn't helping. ;)
 
Decided to give Roon another try here as well. Did a split install with the server running on a little used Macbook Air that while pretty low end at least has a solid state drive. The endpoint is my desktop workstation and control is through my android phone. Install and set up went pretty well but performance issues are preventing me from enjoying it at this time. I am hoping it is related to the initial indexing or whatever it does when first installed because after about 18 hours I am still getting music cutouts every 20 seconds or so. Can't even get through a single song without an issue.

Now I have to say that when it is playing it sounds absolutely wonderful, in fact so good that I am carrying on the experiment for at least the trial period. The only real issue for me with Roon is the system requirements. I really don't want to go out and buy a high end machine just to run Roon when I can run everything else on fairly low end machines. Tidal sounds very nice directly from my low end desktop with no interuptions. I have Sonos upstairs which runs very well with no interruptions. Dont understand why roon pretty much needs a high end workstation to run a single piece of software. It all comes down to budget I guess. I don't have a lot of disposable income at this time and it seems that to make Roon work well it would come down to buying a modern high end desktop machine on top of the cost of the Roon software.
 
You can remote-control Roon from an ipad, right?

I still say the easiest route is BlueSound or something similar. My audio life changed the day I ditched my computer setup and bought a set of streaming components made for the task. But...I haven't done the Roon thing, and have heard it's better than Audirvana and Decibel, which I was using.

@JohnVF

My wallet may regret this, but I'm going to bite. What's so amazingly different between a dedicated streaming set up and a notebook computer with an external DAC?

Thanks,
Ray
 
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