ARC is simply unusable for me

Roon Software Discussion ARC
102

Running Roon on a home network is completely different than streaming directly from a users PC outside of their Network. Roon is at the mercy of Router manufacturers and ISP upload speeds. Who knows if a person’s ISP may throttle down all of a sudden? Roon is also at the mercy of Qobuz and Tidal having accurate data dumps as well as all the other websites Roon gathers it’s data from.

Roon can not control things outside of it’s control.

I personally think Roon is working hard to fix issues and I haven’t really run into many issues. The one time Roon Arc didn’t work for me was when my computer decided to reboot after an update. This was at the unfortunate time of me trying to show my friends how Roon works at their apartment, but alas Murphy’s law struck again.

I will be honesty, the deciding factor for me signing up with Roon was Roon Arc and anytime it didn’t work was not the fault of Roon but my ISP or windows automatic updates.

103

Full bars does not indicate a stable network connection. I get full bars in my train station yet I get no data. If bares know relationship other than an RF signal strength.

Some carriers and phones seem to block access to certain ports too. It’s a bit of a minefield. I just changed my carrier and Arcs been far more stable and not lost signal once. Before it would quite often on my commute.

I do think people expecting the moon on a stick from a cellular connection eg full lossless without hiccups are going to be disappointed. ARC relies on many factors some they can improve on but others are out of their control.

1 Like
104

Why do all other connections to my iPhone work perfect except ARC then? With iTunes I can just ask Siri to play what ever I want and it almost never fails…every now and then Siri must go out for a smoke break…:wink:

105

because

  • apple music and any other service is not being served or reliant on a network connection from your home and subject to your infrastructure and kit at home or you ISP limitations nor rely on specific ports being open that your carrier or ISP might block
  • if its you own music files in itunes match thats streaming its aac only so low bandwidth
  • what are the settings in the Apple Music app set to for streaming music on cellular (defaults will not be lossless). Are these set to similar to ARC.

Does Roon say that it is configured correctly in the ARC settings of the app and its accessible from outside your home?

1 Like
106

Dear John, on the forum I saw how much help you got with Your Bose problem. In that light I find it a little unfair what you say here, sorry.

107

Thanks CG…I will check that out ASAP and let you know what I discover…any help would be much appreciated.

108

Roon says it is not configured properly but Auto detect does not work and I have no idea how to check whether or not I’m using UPnP or NAT-PMP. ??? I’ve been on hold over an hour with my Linksys router trouble line and seems I will not get through today…even their miserable chat is failing…

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109

Me too. I gave up. I really wanted it to work as and all in one service for me. Went back to Apple Music for away from the house non-critical listening. Plex does also have a very nice mobile app.

110

If you ever open your own topic in ARC: Port Forwarding Help with complete information, people could try to help…

The only ARC topic by you that I find was caused by a version mismatch and you said it was fine before that and after the versions were fixed

111

As the OP of this rather long topic, I thought I would provide an update after some very long testing.

Two months ago I began a two month long car journey around Australia, and have one week to go as I type this. I have covered over 30,000 kms in that time and have relied heavily on ROON ARC every day for my music on this trip.

Armed with the knowledge that I have had very little luck in the past with ROON ARC working for more than about 24 hours, I decided to create a large playlist, and DOWNLOAD it to my Google Pixel 7 Pro phone before I left home, for that inevitable moment that ROON ARC stopped working for me.

To my surprise, ROON ARC worked for about 4-5 days before once again it was not accessible. The server I use (Intel NUC) which also ‘serves’ PLEX, continued to do so, proving once again, that it was not an issue with my link at home (1000MBS in, 50MBS out, on fixed IP address) but rather ROON itself.

So that was that, I continued to shuffle the 1250 song playlist for most of the trip, however even that many songs starts to get repetitive after a while. So I called a family member at home and asked them to quit ROON and restart it, which enabled ROON ARC to work once again. I then proceeded to download several albums, which worked perfectly fine.

So, I now had a playlist with 1250 songs, and several complete albums downloaded to my phone. This is where the real issues started.

Over the last week of having these albums on my phone and trying to play them, I would find that ROON ARC (through Android Auto) would take a long time to start playing, and put a message on the display saying GETTING YOUR SELECTION… and after about 30 - 60 seconds would finally start playing the album. Often times it would simply fail to play at all and displaying a message POOR CONNECTION on the display.

For clarification, my phone is connected by USB cable to my car, and all other functions of Android Auto such as Google Maps Navigation were still all working when the POOR CONNECTION message appeared on the screen. On one occasion it started to play a completely different song to what I had chosen!

My assumption would be that there should be ZERO delay in playing content that is stored on the Phone, and prior to downloading extra content that is the way it behaved. I am at a loss to explain the increasingly odd behaviour of ROON ARC, and I have no desire to use PLEX MUSIC as I do not wish to have to recreate all of my playlists etc, so that is not an option, I simply want ROON ARC to work.

5 Likes
112

I would like to give a little update of what I have been dealing with Roon arc. I completely changed my room set up thinking that was the problem of my Roon arc performance.
My previous Roon server set up was on my Synology ds920 with the latest dsm version as a Roon core and I had a iPhone XS Max with latest iOS.
The problem that I was having on my Roon arc app it was freezing and constantly poor connection messages. After resetting Roon arc it would work fine for couple of days and then the same thing, after so many resetting, I ended up changing my set up.
My current set up now in a Mac mini m1 running Roon core with latest os and an iPhone 14 pro max, and what still happening… the same bs, poor connection, freezes and crashes, I gave up already

113

I’ve had the poor connection issues with my previous laptop acting as Core (on a 2014 Mac Mini nowadays). Those issues went away after connecting said laptop to Ethernet instead of WiFi.

If I’m getting those messages now, it means that RoonServer has eaten all the RAM in my Mini again. Which it seems to do a lot on Linux based systems…

114

Just out of interest, do you have UPnP activated in your Modem / Router? Many of my clients had issues with ARC that were solved when UPnP was activated. I use ARC all over the USA and have zero problems.

V

115

Thank you, Yes upnp is activated on my router

116

Maybe Roon should give us a PlexPass with every Roon subscription!

4 Likes
117

It’s free now without a PlexPass subscription (thank you, Plex):

Limited features though if you don’t have PlexPass, but free to stream now when away from home (no offline downloads). Always good to have options :slight_smile:

1 Like
118

Upnp is not activated on my router. Cannot use Roon Arc.

My Qobuz App and my Plexamp apps both work seamlessly with my android phone and android auto.

I spent a lot of time before finding out Arc was incompatible with my router.

Frankly, I use Roon at home and Qobuz in my car.

Problem solved

3 Likes
119

Delete the app from your phone and reinstall it. That fixed everything for me.

1 Like
120

These two things are not really related

121

If unrelated, why does Roon have this on their troubleshooting page?

Confirm your router supports automatic configuration

To automatically configure your network for remote access, Roon uses either UPnP or NAT-PMP.

Most modern routers support this kind of automatic configuration, but you can confirm that your router supports this kind of configuration by consulting the documentation or contacting the manufacturer.