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Brain Farts w/ Roon Nucleus

I have an original Roon Nucleus with a SSD drive in it.  Around 3GB of music.  Together with Tidal, Roon tells me that I have 2039 Artists, 4312 Albums, 61239 tracks, and 136 composers.  That is likely more than most users, but not as many as some of you, so I have read.
 

On a fairly regular basis, Roon has these brain farts moments, lasting 10-15 minutes, where I get the twirling Roon Icon and the system is shut down from playback.  It always eventually comes back. I don’t know the technical term, but I think it is a resort, reorganizing, re-something to the whole data base of music.  It always happens at the most inopportune time. Roon online forum has never come clean for me with an answer/fix.

I have revamped my Ethernet cabling and both the Roon Nucleus and the DAC/Streamer are mainlined, so I know it is not network drop outs.

I’ve read that others have had a similar problem, but never read a solution.  I have been looking into several angles to stop this.  (1) Upgrade to the Roon Nucleus Titan. (2) Checking out to see if some other Roon Ready Server is a better functioning piece of equipment, like the Innous.

I have two DACs/Servers in the house - BlueSound & dCS Lina - and they both have the same brain farts with Roon.  

I really like the functionality of Roon on the Nucleus.  My issue is not sound quality of Roon, it is the performance.  I must admit, that in all of my reading I have not been able to compare the functionality of a Roon Ready Innous vs. Roon Nucleus, or any other Streamer that folks mention here on the forum.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.  Thanks in advance.

pgaulke60

Showing 1 response by mswale

mswale
253 posts
 

This in a nutshell is why any device like this will be obsolete in a few years. Why you will need either an IT background, or know a IT person to keep these units running long term. 

You purchased a cheap computer, in a nice case, applied updates. Then your library has grown over time. This sounds like an indexing issue.

Any 1gb network will have 0 issue streaming music, you need around 5mb to stream hi-rez. Unless your network is not setup properly, it's not your network. 

CPU intensive? To stream music? Nope, it's not, it's disc intensive, buffer/ram Doing DAC is CPU intensive, but just the TCP/IP stream? Nope

Back to the disk, think if you have a big collection of music, you need a fast disk with good cashing, and error correction buffers. This will cost 2-3x over a cheap disk. 

Chances are the software has indexing jobs that run on some time table. These can make anything come to a stop. Yes, having more resources will help, but it is an entire system process. 

Yeah, having a shell open, seeing everything that is running, what is taking up resources.  https://www.unixtutorial.org/commands/top/

Honestly, the easiest way to stream your cataloged music, if to have it on a high quality USB disk, plug that into your DAC or streamer. Keep the music separate from your "computer" . This way you can upgrade the chain and not affect all other parts. You separate the OS from the data. 

Or you get a NAS, learn about networking and QOS, mount that drive on your endpoint. My NAS failed (network card failed), just moved everything to an external disk. Simple, is always better.

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