I live in a rural area outside of Austin that has zero internet options (not even a phone cable) other than cellular hotspot, so I had to pour a ton of money into a Peplink setup (which is also apparently not compatible with the Roon setup anyway) that bonds three providers (AT&T, Verizon & T-Mobile) for a signal stable enough to do my work. I have to carefully track bandwidth usage so I don’t run out.
Roon is incredibly vague about how this works, but I assume it must upload songs from the Core server, which won’t work for me. They should probably warn customers about bandwidth usage – not all of us have unlimited bandwidth. Perhaps if Starlink ever becomes available here I can try it.
Yes, Roon ARC obviously uses cellular data if not connected to WIFI. You can avoid this by downloading your own music to your phone using the Roon ARC app.
You’re thinking about cell data via phone, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
Of course I can manually download songs to my phone, but that defeats the purpose of the convenience of ARC that they’re making a big deal about – the ability to access your entire collection away from home. I’m fine with using cell data on my phone, which is unlimited, to stream Spotify while away from home WiFi. But hotspot data plans are capped, so uploading songs from my Roon Core to whatever cloud service it’s using is a no go for now.
You have to be connected by WIFI or cellular to your Roon core to upload your music files to your phone. Are you saying you don’t have WIFI at home to do that?
If you just want to stream your local files from your Roon core to your iPhone, of course, your core must be connected to your ISP to be available to act as a server.
There is no cloud service, it streams from your core to the device. You can set the quality of that stream to what suits your bandwidth requirements. If using Streaming services then it’s apparently direct from them to arc not from core.
I think I pretty clearly explained how my setup works.
For me to use the ARC app on my phone when miles and miles away from my WiFi, my assumption is that it uploads the files from my Roon core to the cloud. That would drain my limited bandwidth.
No, it streams them from your Core to your phone. You obviously need enough data available at home and on your cellular plan. If you use Tidal or Qobuz, it streams from them to your phone. There is no cloud involved.
It doesn’t upload anything, it streams it from your core to the phone. You can set the quality of this stream it doesn’t have to be lossless. For Tidal and Qobuz it doesn’t come from the core at all. If you worried about your bandwidth don’t use it. But how can you expect to access your Roon library without using your data allowance. At home download then in full quality as that’s via local network not via the net.
Your phone, via the Roon Arc client, connects to your personal Roon Server at home and your music is streamed to your phone directly from your Roon server at home, using whatever way you have of connecting to your server at home, be it cellular or wifi or other mobile internet connectivity.
If your internet bandwidth or data caps on your mobile device are not sufficient to allow streaming your music from your personal Roon server at home to wherever you have the Arc client running, then it’s not going to work for you.
That’s not the point. I don’t need to or want to manually dump songs on my phone, because I can just use Spotify when I’m away from home.
My point is that I CAN’T access my Roon library without using my data allowance. Which is why Arc is not going to work for me, or anyone else with limited data ISP, until a provider with unlimited bandwidth becomes available to me like Starlink.
So long as you have the bandwidth on both your ends → out from your Roon Server at home ← in to your cell phone or wehever your Arc client is, then yes, Roon 2.0 is your music anywhere.
If you don’t have a fitting dataplan and poor connectivity away from home, Roon 2.0 will not help you listen to your music anywhere, it changes nothing about the mobile data requirements if you are away from an unmetered connection.
So no, the point of Roon 2.0 is not to magically make your music teleport to your device away from home. Roon 2.0 is a huge step forward because it obviates the need to pay for external VPN applications to connect to your local LAN to access your Roon server from away from home, and it seems to also reduce the bandwidth required to stream the music.
Well, you seem miffed because Roon ARC requires data at your home for your core to act as a server. If you have Tidal or Qobuz, you can stream from them using Roon ARC. If you don’t want to do that, just delete Roon ARC from your phone and disable port forwarding on your router.
Hmmm, it seems it’s quite clear how Arc works… its Roon’s VPN solution. It’s pretty awesome, it works exactly as intended. You will only feel let down if you expect it to somehow magically make your music not require any data anymore… but that’s not how files and the internet work - data is data, and you still need to have access … to … mobile data.
I think it’s a great move on Roon. I am not miffed. I’m politely pointing out that they may want to explain a bit how it works so people with bandwidth restrictions know what they’re getting into.
I look forward to using it once the damn Starlink becomes available.
