Hi, so if I am on wifi and I want to download like 25 albums to ARC, am I correct that I have to sit by my iPhone and swipe the screen every 15 seconds for like … 1.5 hours, to make sure that it doesn’t get pushed to the background and halt downloads?
There must be a better way??
Thanks,
This is an Apple issue.
You can mitigate it somewhat by going to Settings>Display & Brightness>Auto-Lock and set it to Never.
Arc will still need to be in the foreground though.
Strange … Apple Music doesn’t have this behaviour neither does downloading videos in the background using YouTube, or Netflix, or Disney, or any number of other apps.
Thanks for the suggestion about auto-lock btw, that works… at least now I can leave the phone on the desk and it is downloading everything without me having to keep it alive… but I can’t switch apps of course or it will stop. Anyway, progress though so thank you!
Would not be the first time that Apple treats 3rd-parties differently
That’s interesting.
The issue was recently discussed here
and numerous times before elsewhere, e.g.,
It’s not an Apple issue. There is no problem with Tidal or Qobuz for example and therefore the issue lies with Roon app development.
In my experience, Qobuz doesn’t download in the background, either.
I asked the Apple developers in our company and they say:
Even if the OS is free to pause and cancel then it thinks best … that would be a vast improvement over the current situation in which one has to keep the app open and never leave the app.
Roon developers: any chance you can look into using the above mentioned iOS API?
Wow, this is great work. I think this confirms it. This is simply a Roon developer and prioritisation issue. Not that I’ve clicked the link - but by its title - clearly it CAN be coded, it just hasn’t been. Nice spotting. I also agree about saying that OS is free to pause is really not worth mentioning - the way it’s written reads more like an excuse. All apps have this kind of prioritisation. Seems like this just needs to be prioritised. Let’s hope it doesn’t take as long as Roon mobile to get across the line - which is almost unusable in it’s current state anyway - I’ve moved back to using Plex again, Roon Mobile as much as I want to support it - it just isn’t working well enough and it’s taking too long. If any devs want to reach out and work with me to fix that - I’m open.
Yes, I use plexamp and I use plex. They don’t seem to have figured it out either. Perhaps it’s just really hard to pull off. And like you say, it’s way faster - Arc has some weird performance issues throughout really - it sort of mostly works in the UI, but there are glitches, it doesn’t like slow networks, it resets itself and you have to download again - quite a few issues. Such promise, but not quite there yet.
Oh yes ARC is well broken I find and not reliable or really very user friendly. I went back to PlexAmp and won’t be returning to ARC unless it radically changes its stance on things. It wins only having marginally better sq especially with Muse but the rest is leagues behind. PlexAmp is rock solid.
Not sure this is just an Apple issue as downloading 15GB of music to PlexAmp worked much quicker/smoother.
This doesn’t happen on Android, all the aforementioned apps allow background downloads.
PlexAmp is way quicker and smoother at downloading but still won’t do it when in background. But it gets through an album generally before it times out where arc manages a few tracks at best.
Yes, for some reason ARC is slow to download which makes it all the more painful. There are a lot of outstanding architecture issues that are downgrading the experience unfortunately. Kudos to the team for getting it to where it is, but meaningful fixes are still way too slow to eventuate. I’ve quite arc altogether now because it keeps wanting me to re-login and wipes my downloads folder as a result. When it works it’s great, though slow to navigate and use, with crashes. It’s a shame for something to be 90% there and we probably only need to get to 95%, but we just can’t seem to get there.
True. The way I handle Qobuz download is to let the Qobuz player play tunes while I jog on treadmill. The download continues even when the iPhone screens locks itself.
As to ARC, I (we) can only download from my own library of music that I own, therefore I can put up with active foreground download via home wi-fi. Speed is not an issue. But I guess treadmill strategy applies here too.
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