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June 2024 This is not a Comedy, but for some, it would be, thus the title! I have been improving the sound quality and reducing the cost of my music servers and streaming. I have found an exciting mix for building a Roon Server (or alternative) and making it sound better. I have a spare 2012 i7 Mac mini with 16 GB of RAM, but it's not doing me any good. You can buy one at MacSales.com for about $250 in a similar configuration. You can try to get one with a boot SSD; it doesn't have to be large, as we can use an external USB SSD for storage. I have one of these, and the price has been dropping: Microcenter Inland USB SSD. NOTE: You only need this to store an extensive library on the machine. While at Microcenter or the like, you can grab a faster USB Stick. USB 3.2. When you return home, download Balena Etcher and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS live CD to your favorite working computer. Install and run Etcher. It will ask for the ISO file and the USB stick to flash. Hook up the Mac mini to a keyboard, mouse, display, and wired network—there is no WiFi for you! Put the USB stick in the Mac, hold the Option key down, and press the power button while keeping the Option key held down until the Mac shows the drives to boot from. Then, select the USB stick as the boot drive. Once it boots, follow the instructions to install Ubuntu on the internal hard drive (bye-bye MacOS)… OK, I know what you are thinking. Do you need dedicated operating systems you can use? You could try GENTOOPLAYER, AUDIOLINUX, and more. First, a machine with a desktop and a web browser is your friend. Second, the Mac you just bought is not supported by Apple OS updates, so have at it, live a little, and learn more! If you have gotten this far, the next bit will be even more fun. The Roon folks still need to keep their Linux install pages up to date. Go to their forum, and you will find this. https://community.roonlabs.com/t/ubuntu-roon-server-install-tips/52226/2 From one of the mods, here is the work to do: It’s in the guide, but here’s the bits you need. sudo apt update sudo apt install ffmpeg cifs-utils alsa-lib curl -O http://download.roonlabs.com/builds/roonserver-installer-linuxx64.sh chmod +x roonserver-installer-linuxx64.sh sudo ./roonserver-installer-linuxx64.sh Do this from the terminal app … open the dash and type terminal. You may cut ‘n’ paste each line. The first line tells the machine to update the package lists. The second line downloads and installs three utilities Roon needs The third line downloads the script you need. The fourth line makes the script executable The last line runs the script to install the Roon Core. I cannot help folks if this does not work, so visit the Roon Community above and ask. Now, here is the fun part. Over on Head-Fi, there is a long thread about making Roon sound better. The folks in the Roon Community will ridicule you if you talk about it there. All of these items are simple and reversible: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/roon-optimization-guide-for-increased-sound-quality.968792/ They turn off the processes that scan the local files for level balancing, etc. It only needs to be done once and does not run on streaming files. The following section turns off some of the DSP stuff and improves the sound by not being there. The final section is only to have ONE endpoint installed in Roon. Again YMMV. You can also install minimserver or Lyrion Music Server for your local files and skip Roon. Your ears and your budget will thank you! NOTE: you may want to install an alternative OS dedicated to music playback. Check out Audiolinux and Gentooplayer, for example. Welcome to my world! Come on, the water is fine. It's too bad UpTone Audio has discontinued its Mac mini Power Supply replacement board—ahh, history. RJF -- Wait till I start the write-up on the Raspberry Pi5 with 4TB of NVME.