ARC, love hate relationship

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I was so happy when ARC was released, it was the missing link in my music playing world. Now I could play my full music collection at home, on the road, and some orchestrated subset while flying, all integrated and from one app. And with Roon radio - perfect.

But the experience has been challenging. When it works, it’s fabulous, when it doesn’t, it’s always inconvenient, frustrating and time consuming and I find myself repeating the same steps again and again.

Yesterday ARC just reset itself, nothing changed on my setup, ARC just refused to start while I was driving, indicating I needed to login. Once I got home and had time to investigate, I tried again, (it didn’t ask me to login this time) got the syncing for the first time message etc. And ARC started for the first time, but for the umpteenth time.

The frustration is twofold, first at a minimum, ARC should just work, even if in some suboptimal way, I use ARC in the car, and cannot fix anything while driving.

Second is the lost downloads, again. This will take hours to sync, when it should take minutes. It’s like a petulant child with homework, takes forever to complete and has to be monitored constantly or it won’t be completed.

I do understand the concept of beta software, and as a desktop Linux first person, I’m used to battling through challenges, but ARC seems to have some fundamental issues.

There are, in my opinion, two major flaws in ARC. Punching holes in firewalls is just not done any more, just create a cloud helper service (like the one used for authentication verification) to help the client find the user’s server, this is pretty normal and has been solved for ten or more years on lots of client server apps.

Second, ARC has to be able to work unconditionally with downloaded music. On a recent trip with spotty cell reception, ARC would not play newly selected, downloaded music until it connected to the server. Again while driving, it’s not possible to safely interact with the app, so the client needs to be able to handle that, always.

While all the new features are great, in my opinion, they’re worthless if ARC won’t work when you need it.

I remain a loyal fan of Roon, and hopeful that ARC will get fixed, but for now, I’m probably going to reluctantly revert back to Qobuz’s mobile app. Despite its many usability issues, it works when I need it and doesn’t reset itself requiring hours to recover.

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Amen Alan
I had a similar issue last week where I was playing music on offline mode and it still failed and nothing could get it working again.

I even logged on and rebooted the server and then the phone.
It made me wonder if a Room backend service had failed. Next day it all worked again.

It makes me tempted to go back to PlexAmp and then it works again and I am really happy with it until it lets me down again :pensive:

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What an excellent and so true analogy! Thank you!

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Yes, Arc resetting itself and starting from scratch for the umpteenth time is why I have uninstalled it. It’s not reliable, I don’t want an app resetting itself when I am abroad and just want to listen to music for an hour at the end of the day.

It may be related to the VPN (Nordvpn) on my cell phone, but Plexamp copes ok with it, streaming music from my home server.

Another feature would be choosing how many tracks to cache ahead when streaming, handy for train travel and going through tunnels, Plexamp will cache 15 tracks ahead at times of good connectivity, which is a great feature.

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Or it would be useful if it cached the whole queue since it is supposed to be what you will hear (or as much as the device memory allows if this is less than the queue size)

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It could also be smarter and save anything that was already played (it was downloaded for playing anyway), as well as try some predictive downloading or caching, e.g., other albums by the same artist (up to a configurable size).

Obviously, subject to streaming service restrictions, but that wouldn’t affect local files

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I selected a playlist for Arc to play for the commute home yesterday, with files on my NAS at home and it kept popping up a poor connection message, I’d got a decent 5g signal, tried restarting Arc and same issue.

I selected the same music on the same NAS via plexamp, on original quality and it played instantly and for the whole hour commute.
Plexamp will cache 15 tracks in advance on the playlist.

I will test Arc every time there is a new release, but it can’t be my primary outdoor and mobile source of music until it actually works reliably.

VPN was off as well…