I've been excited about Roon for a long time, but finally signed up a little over a year ago after reading about ARC. As someone who buys a decent amount of digital music to support artists, I thought I would finally have a way to stream my collection both inside my house and on the road. Unfortunately, ARC has yet to pan out for me. This morning, I got Tailscale set up on ROCK and my iphone and I thought I was over the hump. I rebooted ROCK and logged out/back into ARC. Everything looked good! I turned off the wifi on my iphone to give it a test, but unfortunately got the dreaded red banner "Poor connection" pop-up. I read some threads on the Roon community support and tried a few of the suggestions (deleted/re-installed ARC on my iphone, let it sit for most of the day to re-sync my collection), but nothing has helped. I'm hopeful you can help me out! Thanks in advance. I
Describe your network setup
My home router is an Asus ZenWiFi XT9. I don't use any switches or range extenders. I'm using an iPhone 14 pro.
Thank you for your post and we’re sorry to hear you’re having issues.
Can you verify that you’re using Tailscale on this phone? iOS 18.3.3 usually shows the “VPN” icon in the status bar when Tailscale is active. If ARC isn’t in the Tailnet, it won’t be able to reach a Tailscale-activated ROCK instance.
The mismatch might be in the other direction - diagnostics indicate that ROCK resorted to the non-Tailscale network interface on last startup and requests from ARC to the RoonServer instance are intermittently timing out.
If you navigate to Roon Settings → ARC, do you still see the port forwarding interface automatically configuring to setup UPnP for port forwarding? Set the port number to 0; this will restrict ROCK to using Tailscale to reach ARC.
I’d also verify that you’re still signed into Tailscale in the ROCK WebUI - updates or full reboots will sometimes default the system to using the LAN IPv4 assigned by the router.
We’ll watch for a response and continue to troubleshoot. Thanks!
Hi Connor,
Thanks for the quick responses and suggestions! I’ll try to address them one-by-one. First, the latest iOS version available for my phone is 18.3.1. Yes, I can confirm I’m using Tailscale on the iphone (and on ROCK) and that it’s turned on (see screenshots) below.
I had set the port number to 0 yesterday, but just looked at it on my phone and it was showing the previous port number so I again set it to 0. I just reset the Roon Server Software in the webUI and reinstalled ARC on my phone to start completely from scratch. I ensured Tailscale was turned on in both locations as well, but I’m still getting the same “poor connection” banner. I’m not sure if it’s worth noting, but interestingly, I am able to download music in ARC (checked to make sure I’m not on wifi), so it seems odd that ARC is able to access the files for download, but not to play. Just thought I’d mention that. Thanks again.
We’re going to review diagnostics from the last session in ARC with developers. There’s ongoing work with the connectivity manager - if this requires a fix with a future release, we’ll let you know and respond promptly.
However, one last due diligence item. In Tailscale on the iPhone, make sure the VPN-On-Demand settings aren’t automatically switching off the VPN connection when you enable cellular data.
Thanks again, Connor! I checked to make sure the VPN connection isn’t switching off when I turn off wifi (i.e. enable cellular data). I’ll stay tuned and appreciate your responsiveness and the team investigating this. I can’t wait to use Roon while I’m on the road.
Diagnostics indicate the ARC framework records a poor connection state shortly after you disable the WiFi. Based on your screenshots showing a strong 5G connection.
We’re investigating with developers whether the connection is experiencing interference causing timeouts (and its potential cause) or if a connectivity protocol issue is being exposed under these specific conditions.
Thanks for your patience - we’ll respond as soon as we have more information.
We appreciate your patience. We don’t have a conclusive response today but we anticipate more information and an actionable next step before the end of the week. Please reach out in the meantime if symptoms change. One additional thought in the meantime is to set the WiFi Address to “Fixed” instead of “Rotating” in the iPhone’s WiFi settings.
We’ve had a chance to review this further with development.
There is a change being prepared to the underlying connectivity mechanisms that should affect, if not fully resolve, this connectivity condition. To be clear, this change isn’t released but, but it will be included in the next Early Access build. From there, it will merge into an upcoming public Roon build in the coming weeks.
Please keep an eye on Early Access for announcement of the release. If you’d like to test the fix, you can follow these instructions to migrate your RoonServer and ARC to the test branch.
That sounds like a positive development, Connor. Thanks again for staying in close touch! I’ll keep my eyes on early access for more details about the release.
