David McGown wrote:
How about a cheap DIY Roon Nucleus...
Just recased my NUC7i5BNK into an fanless AKASA Newton case (NUC35-M1B). The case is basically a big heatsink for the CPU. Since I did not have a storage drive in my NUC (relying on a NAS for music files), I decided to install a 2TB SSD in the case so I can just rely on local storage and use the NAS for backup. Anyway, took me an hour to take out the NUC board, remove the heatsink/fan assembly, clean up the CPU thermal paste, and then placed it into the new chassis. Currently copying my library over, mounting the DIYNucleus internal data drive to Synology, and transferring the files using the Synology File Station. I plan on keeping the Roon internal storage share mounted to the NAS so I can keep the two music directories in sync, but use local storage to stream to my endpoint to reduce overall network traffic.
David
David,
Since you are not using the streaming services, I suggest you try mpd as the music player instead of Roon. It’s the best music player out there. Compared to Roon or JRiver, it sucks at library management.
Couple of years ago, Grover and I tried music server Linux distributions, ap-Linux.com and Snakeoil-os.net. If I remember correctly, Grover found ap-Linux too detailed in his system, but I liked it so much I struck with it since then. AP-Linux takes minimalist approach with very light GUI interface. Snake oil tries to be more user friendly with web enabled management and a choice of mpd versions.
It just takes an hour to install and them them running. Would be lot of fun.
I stayed away from NUCS because you cannot use specialized USB PCI Cards like SoTM or JCAT with them. SoTM made a huge improvement in my system.