I’ve been having trouble with ARC. For a very long time I haven’t been seeing album titles in BT metadata, so recently I tried starting a fresh Roon Server and then restoring a backup. That lasted about a day, but ever since I’ve been having more serious problems with ARC. Namely, something causes the core to hang and then I have to restart it before Roon or ARC works again.
Another thing that I noticed in all of this, is that when I first set up ARC, it looks like the connection to the core is not stable from the get go.
After the ARC reset, I choose my core. It says it’s online, but does not proceed to choosing the active profile. Instead it stays that way or says the core was last seen X time ago.
If I quit ARC and start it again, I get to choosing the profile. But then it shows no profile, nothing to choose. It will stay that way until I restart ARC.
After I restart ARC again, I get the message that ARC is syncing with the core for the first time. But again, it will just stay that way indefinitely unless I restart ARC again.
When I restart I will usually get a gray screen. Then after I restart again it will finally start working.
But like I said, I just continue having issues.
This leads me to believe that there’s something unstable in the connection to the core.
BTW all of this is also when I’m inside my LAN.
The core reports that ARC is setup properly.
Today I tried using a fresh Roon Server without restoring a backup and I get the same stuck stages of setting up ARC so I’m guessing it’s not a bad backup and that there is actually a network issue. I have an Asus RT-AX88U router which I believe is set up correctly.
Any idea what can be the problem?
I’ll attach some screenshots.
After a week with a fresh core DB, the core still hangs from time to time and needs a restart.
I’m at my wits’ end. Maybe my core is simply not strong enough anymore?
It’s pretty old by now. Core i5-4460 with 8GB of RAM… my library has 33K tracks.
Do I need a new desktop?
Thank you for your patience while we worked through our queue to reach your response.
The symptoms you’re describing generally match a token mismatch situation, when ARC is confused between two or three instances of a Roon Core that have extant traces on the network (even if you’ve deleted them).
Please try a complete database refresh to begin. This should refresh conditions and allow us to more precisely pinpoint what’s wrong in logging as we proceed with troubleshooting:
Hi @connor, I’ve done the above several times by now. That might explain why my core hangs much more often now, and why it started happening only after I started a fresh DB the first time.
Therefore I’m confused as to why you would want me to start a fresh DB again. Also in the last bullet it says “before restoring the backup”. Do you mean for me to restore the backup eventually or not?
My current state is that after a week with the fresh DB when I saw my core still hangs, I ended up restoring the DB since I might as well have all of my edits and config in place.
BTW in all of those times I didn’t reinstall ARC, I simply clicked “reset Roon ARC” on the app. Is that what makes the difference between ARC confusing with older cores or not?
BTW 2, today my core froze while playing music to a plain old Roon Remote (iPad), i.e. not an ARC, within my network. Is that consistent with your suspicion?
Thanks!
Hi again @connor,
As an experiment I set up a new core on a different machine, which has double the RAM and a better CPU. The storage drive is also different. At first I tried restoring a backup from the previous core and then I tried again with a completely fresh DB.
The result is that ALL of my usual problems are still happening with the new core:
The core freezes regularly and requires a restart
Most of the time, album titles are not reported to Bluetooth metadata
Roon Radio forgets its original seed after some inactivity and starts a fresh radio with the last played track as the new seed
Rarely the Arc app crashes
So this leads me to believe the root cause is either with my home network (although I have good hardware and otherwise everything works perfectly), or the Arc app on my phone (Samsung S21 Ultra 512Gb, quite powerful still), or just some bugs that for some reason only happen for a small subset of users.
