Roon and Smooth Stream using Drive Bender

Recently we had a user ask how to improve pool performance when using Roon while connected to Drive Bender backed storage…. let’s take a look!

A Roon with a view

Roon is a high-end music management and streaming solution that can deliver music to many different audio platforms (see What is Roon). Personally, I’m a big fan of Roon (kudos to the dev team, IMHO very well engineered software), and have been running Roon using a Drive Bender pool as the storage endpoint for some time… so I thought I would share my experience.

The setup

The Roon platform is a powerful piece of kit, and, in my case, it streams upsampled content to my Devialet Expert Pro 220 (I’ve just ordered a Denafrips Terminator)… all transported over ethernet. The Roon server is a dedicated Linux machine, with the music files stored on a Drive Bender pool, sitting on an oldish Windows Home Server 2011 machine (out of interest, this is the old server we tested on back in the day). As anyone that has used Roon knows, it can be quite demanding on the hardware it interacts with, while the Roon server hardware is fine (Core i7 with plenty of RAM), the Drive Bender pool server is a rather old, bloated machine attached to 12 hard drives that are anywhere from 3 to 10 years old (I say bloated as it has never been rebuilt). The music pool itself contains some 10,000 music files, consisting of lossless WMA and WAV files (Roon does not support WMA). Most of these files are lossless rips of my CD collection, however, there are quite a few 192/24 and DSD hi-res files.

In operation

During playback, Roon pulls the files from the Drive Bender pool over ethernet, processes it, then sends it on to the Devialet, resulting in some magically musically experiences right? Well, not always… when I first set everything up, I would get the odd stutter every few tracks, which was very annoying, to say the least. After eliminating the Roon server hardware as the cause, I started to look at the pool and discovered a couple of the hard drives, while still healthy, had less than stellar performance, which is a Roon no-no. Luckily I know a thing or two about hard drives, and decided to do some testing and connected these same drives directly to Roon via USB, no real improvement… bugger! Now I’m not privy to how the Roon team go about pulling data from the assigned storage and didn’t have the time to investigate. So it seemed to me the only solution was to replace these otherwise healthy drives with new, faster ones… but wait, I hadn’t tried Smooth Stream, a feature that has been part of Drive Bender since v1 (yes I know, you would have thought this would have been my first go to fix… but hey, forest for the trees blah blah blah). I enabled Smooth Stream, and boom, I’ve never heard a single stutter since!

Hindsight is 20 20

This was the very same problem experienced by our Drive Bender user recently… and thanks to my own experience, I suggested he enable Smooth Stream, and bingo… all was golden!

Safety first

Re my old drives… I’ve spent many years building my ripped library, I can’t imagine how many hours have been consumed ensuring rips are error-free, and all metadata was in place (pre Roon). For those reading this and concerned over the age of some of the drives in my music pool… fear not, I run duplication on my music folder, so I’m happy that nothing will be lost.

Final thoughts

Being a Roon fan, and a fan of cloud storage, the next logical step is to combine the two. While Roon does support Dropbox, I prefer a local storage endpoint, or to clarify, an endpoint that appears to be local. Using a modded version of the Smooth Stream code, and some other cloud components I had laying around, I’ve been doing some prototyping on a solution and will be using the Denafrips Terminator to test the results. In my view, having Roon stream your own collection directly from the cloud is a no brainer, and Smooth Stream may well be the key. Let me know what you think, and is this something other users would be interested in?