Service With a Smile

My collection of recordings is so large as to be daunting. It takes up about six terabytes of disc space, all either FLAC or Apple Lossless files, directly downloaded or ripped from compact discs, with a tiny subset digitized from 78s or vinyl. And all of them are safely stored on a network-attached storage system (NAS) with dual hard drives in RAID 1 configuration. It backs up to an external hard drive, thence to a cloud backup service. I don't want anything getting lost.

Two applications own the market for serving out digital audio files to clients. I use both. My mainstay is JRiver Media Center. It will never win any awards in the glamour department. It looks like a 1990s UNIX app written for the X Window system. Nevertheless, it's solid and reliable. Most importantly, it lets me organize and present my collection in an almost unlimited number of ways. Of course that requires being assiduous about the file tags, but I most definitely am.

In a household with multiple sound systems, such as mine, serving out those files to multiple points is a non-negotiable requirement. Media Center is pretty good on the whole about that. The trick is to 'share' out the library of a single instance of Media Center that has direct access to the stored digital files. The clients can then tap into that. The mechanism for doing that is a bit overly techie, but once you've got it, the thing works beautifully. Apps on an iPhone or iPad can access the server, and they can channel the audio to any of the other clients. Again, it works quite well. Over the years Media Center has acquired a subset of other abilities, including the ability to rip CDs, show videos, and include some streaming services. But those are notoriously awkward, and best not used.

The competition is an application called Roon, designed from the ground up to share out one's own library files easily, and to other clients as well. It's as easy to set up and operate as Media Center is techie. It also has the advantage of being attractive. It keeps the technical stuff mostly under the surface.

Another big advantage to Roon is that it blurs the distinction between one's own library files and those being streamed off either Tidal or Qobuz, both of which Roon supports from within its main app. Search for a particular album and you might get a mix of stuff from your own library and stuff from Tidal (my streaming service of choice.) There's no distinction made between the two.

Roon has its own way of doing things and is far less customizable than Media Center. One can't micro-manage one's collection the way I can on Media Center. For the most part it's going to do things its own way. Most of the time that's fine. Box sets are particularly an issue along those lines. But I can live with it.

Roon can also play out to various stereo components that have been designed as Roon endpoints, so no computer is needed. That's true of the Bluesound Node that's in my upstairs library room. Roon can serve anything to the Node that it can serve to anything else. Pretty handy. There are a lot more Roon-certified products appearing every day.

Roon is the app of choice for most audiophiles. I think that's because of the way it protects typically non-techie audiophiles (usually older guys) from the nitty-gritty. You can't really get all that much out of Media Center without rolling up your techie sleeves, but Roon is just fine right out of the can. Both serve out bit-perfect audio, so whatever imaginative speculations might arise amongst audiophiles about one of them sounding better than the other, there's really no difference between them unless you've been playing around with some of their settings.

Since I've been doing so much with these apps I finally decided to put both on a dedicated server computer. It's a brand-new Mac Mini with an M4 processor. Overkill to be sure; all the processing power in that sucker isn't being tapped by these apps. But it didn't really cost any more than any other small-factor desktop computer and I really prefer to keep everything within the Apple sphere. So at this moment the single most powerful computer in the house is the one acting as both Roon and Media Center server. But that's OK; my record library is important to me, so it deserves the royal treatment.