An ARC reliability observation

Roon Software Discussion ARC
1

I’ve been using ARC, largely successfully, since launch.

As many of you know, I run Roon on my Synology NAS, where I also have Audio Station/DS Audio running alongside Roon as a secondary platform.

My house is in a cell service shadow, and with DS Audio, I got into the habit of starting DS Audio on my phone on WiFi before leaving the house, so that I could be sure that I could get some music buffered and going from my driveway until I got cell signal again. This always worked well with DS Audio.

I had basically thought that would work well with ARC as well, but as it turns out, while I can play the first one or two songs that are in my queue after leaving my house, once I am on cell signal and ARC tries to buffer new music, it fails, 100% of the time. I have to quit ARC to allow it to start a fresh connection to the cellular network to resume playing.

If, instead of trying to play ARC continually from my house and beyond, I wait until I am back up the road where there is cell service before playing ARC, I do not have this problem.

It seems that, unlike other software like DS Audio, ARC is not currently designed to switch from WiFi to cellular service in a playing session (if at all). That might be an opportunity for the ARC engineers to solve.

I hope this helps the dialog about ARC reliability.

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2

That’s not my experience with ARC - it switches seamlessly for me. However, I am probably on a different provider to you (I’m on Vodafone NL), and there may be other factors at play as well.

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3

Fair enough. But to further clarify, I believe that it can take a few songs before it catches up. In other words, I believe that ARC buffers, say, 1-3 songs on Wi-Fi, and it is after those songs are done playing that ARC tries to retrieve more songs while on cellular, and then fails.

But back to your point, I could certainly be wrong, and it could have to do with a combination of carriers and other factors.

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4

I’ve had the same experience as you

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5

It’s used to be a lot better with switching than it currently is. I have found that switching from Wi-Fi to cellular has been the main cause of it crashing out the core as it’s only done it after I have left work but since moving provider this hasn’t happened. So I do think the cellular provider is the cause of most of ARCs issues.

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100% agreed. It is definitely worse now than it was during the early releases.

7

Identical experience for me as well.

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8

My experience is opposite. ARC used to stop when I left my home and got out of range of WiFi. Sometimes I could restart it and it would switch to cell service. Sometimes it refused to connect over cell. Now it switches seamlessly. I think the key for me was to assign a reserved IP for my core. Everything stabilized after that.

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For what it’s worth, this doesn’t sound like the opposite; it sounds like the same, but it happens not to be a problem for you at present.

On a side note, I’ve always had a reserved IP for my core.

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Mine switches seamlessly.

12

I can confirm that the reliability of ARC has significantly decreased following updates that incorporated MUSE. Sadly.

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TLDR; ARC has been rock solid for me through all the relevant versions of Roon. Roaming from wifi to mobile and back works seamless.

It is obvious that there are a lot of factors in play to have a positive experiance with ARC.
As Roon (ARC) is a networked service everything is dependent on a stable network and mobile infrastructure.
ARC uses both mobile and home networks, so if one of these fail, everything fails.

In my case, i use enterprise grade equipment, not consumer grade or «audiophile» (pun intended) equipment, and my experience is that ARC works, everytime, all the time.
My ARC port is not open, i use a VPN (wireguard) to connect to my own homenetwork and this is a flawless setup.
Another benefiet of VPN is that all my mobile traffic is encryptet wherever i am.

In case of problems with ARC, always question the reliability of the networks involved.

As always: YMMV.

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14

The Audio equipment doesn’t enter into the ARC equation really, it’s entirely an issue of networking locally (your LAN) and networking outside your LAN (which sadly you can’t influence at all.)

Now, if you are connecting to your LAN via VPN from remote, then you are extending your LAN to your remote location. And I question what the performance and capabilities of ARC have to do with your successful use of Roon remotely when you are connected to your LAN and to the Roon core via VPN.

The entire point of ARC is that you don’t (need to) use a third party VPN product to listen to your music; Roon has added that functionality into their product, allowing their ARC client software to find your dynamic IP and connect to the Roon core at home without direct access to your LAN that you otherwise would need to gain access to via a generic VPN.

As to the original topic: I also have seen that ARC has big issues when switching to cellular (remote) access, whereas testing ARC at home on the LAN was just fine, in the car a half our later it can’t make a connection. However having arrived at the destination, restarting the ARC client (sometimes even restting it entirely) allows the connection to succeed.

15

I have a dead zone on my way to work. Anywhere from 5 to 14 minutes based on traffic / conditions. ARC cannot recover from this. It just stop playing when it runs out if buffer and never recovers.

Apple Music and other services usually buffer enough of the queue to get through the dead zone.

If one of those services can’t make it through the dead zone Apple Music starts up again without issue by hitting “next”. This works 80% of the time with Tidal.

16

Yes, this too.

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I don’t understand the comment which seems to imply a lot about the network situation or gear. It’s not that much data in the scheme of the internet. When everything else is reliable on someone’s network, but Roon is not, then i don’t think this is a helpful comment, which I’ve seen so often over the years. Roon has lots of room for improvement especially with ARC.

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18

Yes you are right, it is not a lot of data.

Surfing the net is something all consumer products manage to do. This is not a measure of «everything is working without problems».

Yes, Roon ARC is not perfect.
But, a bad network topilogy is killing Roon (ARC) experience.
People have to be aware that «audiophile» networking gear does not need to be a dependable networking device.
Not to mention people using (professional) networking gear like media convertors and the likes to increase audio quality, not knowing what they are doing….

Anyway, Roon depends on a fully functioning network. Any problem in connectivaty will degrade Roon experiance.

19

What i have posted is how it seems to break and i don’t think that is simply a networking issue, but so many go to not having enterprise networking as a solution. I’ve read what Roon recommends and followed what i could. You can see what I’ve posted about ARC and i have the problem of 17k albums. If you have crazy lifelike video games being played by numerous users at the same time sending insane amounts of data, then Roon should be able to handle the small amounts similar to how brilliantly Apple lossless works . But there is the rub, music is like less than a penny on the ground for Apple. But then there is UAPP, again brilliantly almost flawless and done by one dude. We should expect better, and i think the OP has identified one of countless issues that can be resolved by Roon.

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For what it’s worth, I am running an enterprise network, using a pfSense+ firewall/router with a dual stack network and Cisco switching. I am an IT professional by trade.

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Mikrotik routers and Cisco switching, also dual stack. Vlans and vxlan and distributed wifi.
Working all my life with enterprise IT.

FWIW, my Roon (ARC) experiance is flawless.