I am pretty devoted to ARC at this point. I use it all day, every work day in the office. I just charge my phone on a dock at the same time.
There have been a couple times where it went down for a few days, but it really wasn’t an issue. I just used Qobuz and Apple Music apps until it was up and running again. But I certainly missed it while it was down, it just wasn’t the end of the world.
So my answer-in my use case- is yes. It is worth it.
I would say it depends. For me, I use Arc to listen to both music that I’ve downloaded with it, and sometimes to stream something new using it. Because I view it as a new thing for Roon, - simply their effort to remain relevant in a world of mobile streaming - I understand that its quirky and may not be working as expected. So, I set up the usual Arc connection to the Core that I mainly try to use, but as it drops and misbehaves, I simply turn on the VPN to the home-system and that works fine.
Arc is a new thing - still young and has a lot of room to improve. If and hopefully more and more people use Arc, - it’ll incentivise the developers to spend more on improving and developing it. If people walk away from it, - then, it’ll just be cut-off.
Streaming via the streaming apps - Tidal / Qobuz etc…will definitely be reliable - it’s their bread & butter after all, but the benefit that I see from using Roon is that their algo’s - insight - understanding of the listener is impeccable, I rarely skip music when using Roon, whilst, I’m constantly having to skip tracks - make requests - and do things when listening to the Tidal / Qobuz. Alternatively, I need to rely on being with others that have Spotify - as it’s the only other service that I press play and rarely make changes to.
ARC makes no sense to me. I use Roon to listen to music at home in the best possible quality. I never listen to music on the side while I am otherwise occupied, it would only distract me from the music. The only exception is during a long drive in the car. For that I have my favorite tracks in Lossless format on my iPhone which plays them via CarPlay. High-resolution music in the car is a pointless endeavor. For this reason, I stick with Roon version 1.8.
You must be on an old 1.8… cause the 1.8 I just installed unfortunately still seems to have ARC in it. 
I love it!
Really? That seems weird as ARC was released with 2.0, the announcement:
I also have connection with ARC away from home. I’m not trying to listen to anything other than my ‘local library’ and more often than is pleasant I receive poor connection’ message.
I then try Qobuz or Spotify and no issue is present. It’s particularly annoying a I cancelled ‘I-tunes match’ which I never had a problem with.
I love it. Not all my music is on Qobuz (or Spotify, for that matter) and so being able to have access to the same library everywhere through ARC is genius.
I use it remote in car and office. I have periodically had connection to core problems but decreasing now. Pretty solid last month or so, but have not been playing close track. What they are trying to do is hard, covering a ton of use cases and Telecomm/ network variability. For me it’s a B+
Somehow Arc early access must still apply to 1.8 Legacy
Somehow it must, apparently, but it’s weird as I would have thought the whole point of Legacy was to branch it off the 1.8 code
Legacy may have local search but it has a lot of network action still going on, even with an all local library.
Sure, as did 1.8 before 2.0 was released, but regular 1.8 didn’t include ARC. I just assumed they branched 1.8 Legacy off the regular 1.8 production code tree and fixed it up a bit. Adding ARC in there is quite a change. Interesting, is all
Arc was first available on 1.8 but not publicly. All the arc testers used arc beta on 1.8 before the final release of on arc on 2.0, so the switch is still on with my account and arc access is still able to be enabled in 1.8 legacy it seems.
Ah ok, that’s a very good point. Does it actually work? I guess it must have been left at that very early state?
I must have forgotten about that because I was ARC testing as well and the (closed) forum room from then is called “Roon 2.0 Testing (Archive)”, so somehow I thought it was always labeled 2.0 during testing, but maybe you were in an earlier testing group
Yes and No. As expected, the newer arc client doesn’t talk to older cores. So the arc code still lives within 1.8 Legacy. Just needs a switch from Roon to show up. Or maybe it’s something in my backup.
Either way it doesn’t work and I’m fine with that. I imagine alot of 1.8 Legacy user that stayed because they didn’t want arc aren’t going to like that it’s still there. lol.
I’ve been using plexamp more lately. My arc client doesn’t update anymore either as ios 14 is required now. I’m not updating to ios 15 or 16 just to have a current version of arc.
Arc is good when it works which is most of the time. I use Qobuz for streaming but it doesn’t work over a mobile connection whereas Arc does and provides access to Qobuz when on the move. And, of course, Arc also provides access to my stored library. However, in the garden where wi-fi is weak Arc seems to struggle switching to mobile and maintaining continuity.
How so? It should
Mine does…
I had high hopes for Arc, especially the ability to consolidate all my musical needs within one app. Sadly, it still just does not seem ready for prime time. From the outset it has proven to be barely usable and, given the frustration it’s unpredictable behaviour evokes, sometimes dangerous: CarPlay apps should not be this unreliable.
From the glowing reports others have posted here I realize I must be an outlier of sorts, for now but for now Arc is a non-starter.