Innuos Music Servers allow you to easily and quickly integrate on your new or current Roon system. They provide the option for the user to install Roon’s software in order to browse, manage and play music. Roon server integration when enabled will replace the native innuOS Music Library and Music Player functions so these will be automatically disabled. The following 3 options are provided in terms of integration:
- Roon Core – Your Innuos Server will act as a Roon Core server so it will manage the stored music as well as playing music to both connected DACs to the Innuos Music Server as well as other endpoints on your network.
- Roon Player only – Your Innuos Server will act solely as a Roon Bridge endpoint player, you will need a Roon Core running on another system on your network in order to play music on the Innuos Server.
- Roon Core with Squeezelite Player (Experimental) – Similar to the Roon Core mode above where the Innuos Server is running as Roon Core but using Squeezelite as the Music Player instead of Roon’s Music Player. This is an experimental mode provided as is and therefore not guaranteed to work reliably.
This Experimental Mode may have occasional dropouts. It uses Roon’s own Squeezebox integration which supports audio only up to 24bit/192kHz PCM and DSD64 therefore it is limited by it and we cannot predict any future developments or further improvements.
Innuos Servers hardware specifications do not meet recommendations provided by Roon – you can check them here – especially with regards to CPU. Our experience of integrating Roon since 2016 has shown us that the main constraint is if you want to upsample music files to DSD (converting PCM files to DSD on the fly requires a lot of CPU power) or if you want to provide DSP to more than 4-5 endpoints. Innuos philosophy has been the use of Low-Power CPUs that pollute as little as possible and allow for higher quality linear power supplies. These have brought, in our view, better results than upsampling to DSD or running a separate Roon Core Server. However, if you do plan to use those features then we recommend not to use the Innuos Music Server as a Roon Core and to use a different Roon Core instead.