Roon, by far the most popular music player around, is a must-have for music enthusiasts with a large music files database of their own. While it may be considered a bit expensive to deploy, the benefits it offers are well worth the investment. With its advanced features and seamless user experience, Roon elevates the way we listen to and enjoy music. Whether you’re a casual listener or an audiophile, Roon provides an unparalleled music playback experience.
Its intuitive interface allows for easy navigation and organization of your music library, ensuring you never miss a beat. So why settle for anything less when you can have the ultimate music player in your arsenal? Upgrade to Roon today and experience the magic of high-quality audio like never before.
So how do we deploy this magical piece of software and what hardware do we actually need to make it work for us? Not a simple queston to answer you would think. However….
In this article I will describe the solution i thought of for my over 150.000 tracks and 15000 albums music library, a fast, fexible and easy to maintain and expand server that I now have connected to my home network.
First of all let me explain the system in general and make some comparisons to existing solutions you can find on the internet and also compare with the Roon nucleus.
For a large number of High Res Flac files you need a great deal of disk storage like at least 15TB and because you probably like to have some redundancy to this storage, so you don’t lose your precious music files when a disk gives up, you need this storage in a disk array.
On the Roon hardware systems suggested on the internet and on the Roon web site, where they suggest you install Roon Core on an Intel NUC computer, the storage for music files is very limited and has no redundancy. Also maintenance is difficult and there is virtually no possibility to expand the storage. Even the Roon nucleus has limited storage and this at a relatively high price.
The system I suggest here is an ‘all in one’ system, actually a very powerful NAS system, that holds the server software and the disk array with redundancy, the Roon server and some additional applications to support your music files. It is easily expandable even to hundreds of terabytes if you ever should need it and the hardware is fast with a 8 core CPU that can easily do all the ‘Muse audio control’, enhanced EQ, calculations for multiple streams. And with it’s 32BG of DDR5 memory it can handle a database of up to a million FLAC and DSD music files.
The system runs UnRaid a linux based operating system from the USB key that you should install in the internal USB slot on the motherboard. Setup is easy however some settings have to be considered to actually boost Roon performance.
List of products you need to build the server
Software (apps are available from the UnRaid community app store for free)
- UnRaid server license (see text for more on this)
- Roon server for UnRaid
- Musicbrains Picard for Unraid
- Roon server license to activate the Roon server
- NAS server case like Jonsbo N3 (AliExpress)
- Power supply SFX for the system about 300W (depth less than 105mm !)
- Motherboard with preferably an Intel I3-N305 CPU for NAS (AliExpress)
- 32GB DDR5 DRAM
- 1 or 2 M.2 SSD 1TB sticks for server cache and Roon server data
- 2 or more Seagate Xnn harddisk drives for storage
- Good quality USB stick 32GB or 64GB to hold the server oprating system
Nice Jonsbo N3 NAS case with six hot pluggable drive bays. The case can hold the complete system, motherboard and the power supply. Note that the power supply is sold separately.
I3-305 mainboard from Topton with CPU fan. The board has six SATA3 and 2 M.2 slots vor SSD drives. Additionally is has 4 2.5GB NIC ports and can hold up to 32GB DDR5 DRAM.