Latest roon core running on older Mac Mini with macOS 12.6.5, 8GB
2633 albums, 28840 tracks
Latest ARC on iphone 11, latest iOS
VW ID.4 2023
I’m not seeing a general feedback topic on ARC, so i thought i’d drop a few things here.
First off i am so grateful for ARC and carplay - it’s allowing me to break free of iTunes/Music and stream my large library everywhere instead of bothering with loading and managing library on iPhone vs macs at home. So awesome!
But since it’s still kinda new i think it could use some improvement. Maybe you’re already working on this stuff, dunno.
- ARC works generally great on my phone, but has issues on carplay. I often find myself restarting the app to get the carplay part to work correctly/better.
- Default/home screen on carplay - why only show one row of recently added albums? It leaves so much blank space on the screen. I know carplay interfaces vary in size, but on my VW with it’s larger screen and smaller icons the row of albums only covers about 1/3 of the screen and below that just lots of empty space. Multiple rows of albums, or adding a row of recently played - or anything really.
- The default screen on carplay often doesn’t show album cover images, just blank placeholders for the album. I often need to pick up my phone and restart the app to get them to show. On the phone it looks just fine and shows the album cover images.This happens pretty regularly.
- i don’t have any great suggestions but trying to select music through the carplay UI is a challenge, i often find myself picking up the phone to find what i want. Some of this i know is due to limits of the carplay UI, it’s also not super easy with the Music carplay app, so i’m not looking for miracles. Looking at Apple Music for an example of music discovery, they have various types of playlists and collections to choose from up front. Maybe roon/ARC can present randomly selected artists or genres from the library on the default carplay screen?
- If ARC resumes playing something after I get into the car and it connects, can you please have it default to the currently playing track screen? In general I think it’s better to have it default to the current playing or paused track rather than the “home” screen with the line of album covers. But particularly if it is actually playing a track. Having to press the “now playing” icon in the top right is annoying. The less i need to interact with the screen the better.
- Genre - please add ability to browse the library by genre!
- playback issues - when the alerts pop up showing “poor connection” or “connection issue” or whatever, please automatically try to keep playing the song, even if it has to pause for a few seconds. The less i have to interact with the screen the better. Maybe have the “poor connection” show as an overlay but then go away when it’s corrected instead of making me hit “OK” even though it doesn’t do anything other than dismiss the alert. I think most other apps handle this sort of buffering/delay situation by showing a spinning progress icon until it’s working again. That would be ok.
I love ARC and again am just trying to give feedback to make it better!
thanks