Firstly, I wanted to report that, apart from a little foul-up yesterday, Roon quite happily played the music I had downloaded to my phone on the way home today & it was great!
With regard to yesterday, I was quite happily playing music that had been downloaded to my phone when suddenly it all stopped & I saw a red warning on my phone (but couldn’t investigate further, as I was driving). After a brief pause, it then started playing something completely random which, seeing as I always have “Roon radio” switched off because I absolutely do not want to listen to something that I haven’t explicitly chosen to listen to, seemed a bit odd.
I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation. Maybe I had inadvertently created a queue. Maybe my wife picked up the phone & accidentally pressed a button or something.
In any case, we had no such problems this morning.
I do wonder whether my phone got too busy being a satnav & prevented the app from playing music at the same time or perhaps from buffering?
Secondly, & what I really want to say, further to the above, is lifted from a different thread, where it may get buried, so…
I don’t know whether or not ARC needs an internet connection while I’m playing downloaded music from my phone, (I’ve heard expressions used on here to do with “pinging the server”) but it occurs to me that if ARC does do that, then it completely negates the idea of playing downloaded music, which I sometimes have to do because there is often no internet signal around where I live.
It also occurs to me that a major improvement to ARC would be for downloaded music to be separate to the app so that it’s still there after a re-install, but I have no idea what the implications of that would be.
Let’s face it, if the above shortcomings could be solved, ARC really would be the ultimate solution. Unfortunately, ARC seems to need a completely fresh install on a fairly regular basis & re-downloading all that music every time is enough for me to go back to my previous solution of playing music from my phone using Fubar, which never caused me any issues. (I mean, if I mostly can’t remote-play music from my hard drive at home in any case, it seems silly to keep wasting time on trying to make this my “out of home” solution, really, however much I might want to.)