Hi,
Recently a new sort of problem started happening for me in ARC. From time to time, when a new track is supposed to start playing it will not. When I click play again it displays the loading animation for a split second and then stops. There’s no error message (no “something went wrong” or anything). Trying to skip to a different track won’t work either.
When that happens, sometimes a restart of Arc helps but sometimes it doesn’t. A restart of the core never fixed it. When nothing works, it somehow sorts itself out after a few hours.
What’s more troubling is that it happens with downloads so it’s not a network problem, but makes downloads a lot less reliable. However, when it happens I also can’t play any streamed tracks so not sure it’s a downloads issue (I started using downloads recently and it only started happening since, so not sure if related).
It only happened when I’m in my car, never when I’m connected to a USB DAC and never when taking a walk with BT earphones, but then again I use Arc in the car 99% of the time.
I wanna say it happens mainly when using Android Auto, but it also happened once while using simple BT in the car.
Hi @Chikolad,
Thank you for the report. Does starting/stopping the car while ARC when ARC is connected to Android Auto ever cause this condition?
We can see several possible mechanisms based on diagnostics, but if you can provide an example of a track that was playing (or, more accurately, failed to play) then we can pinpoint the specific failure.
We do see ARC reporting severe thermal status from the phone’s OS. Is the phone hot to the touch when this occurs? Does the issue occur more frequently when you’re using DSP?
Hi @connor, thanks for the reply.
I can say that it’s not about stopping / starting the car.
Regarding a specific track, I remember that one time when it failed I tried playing the first album in my downloads list which was The Soul Cages by Sting, so the track would be “Island of Souls”.
I don’t specifically recall the phone being very hot when it happens, and also sometimes it would happen early in the morning when it’s not that hot outside yet. But I also wouldn’t rule it out. I can say that I didn’t experience any other issues with the phone at those times, no lagging or anything. I was also able to play music through the Tidal app.
I don’t use any DSP in the car other than volume leveling. When I did use ARC with a USB DAC last week and heavier DSP (EQ) it worked flawlessly, but it was in an air conditioned room and no charging.
Thanks again!
Hey @Chikolad,
Thanks for following up!
We didn’t find anything related in your Arc diagnostic, unfortunately, let us know the next time it happens again and we’ll take another look.
More specifically, does this happen randomly during a listening session? Or, does it happen as soon as you open Arc to start a session?
When in the car, are you using the cars audio system of anything else while Arc is running? Or is there another notification sound from your phone around the time the issue occurs?
Both, it might happen at the start of a session or after already playing a couple of tracks. But normally it would happen near the beginning of the session. Never in the middle of a track though (with an exception below*).
I use Android Auto, so obviously other apps are running. But no, it doesn’t seem related to notifications.
Overheating might be related, although as I said it doesn’t seem like any other apps suffer from it.
*Another thing I started noticing lately which might or might not be related is app crashes. The playback would stop, and when I go to check the app I would see it restarted itself or simply crashed and I need to start it again. But when that happens I’m able to resume playback.
Do you see any crashes in the logs?
Thanks @benjamin!
Hi @Chikolad,
Thank you for the report. There are indeed logged crashes associated with your account in analytics, but we want to verify whether they match the incidents you described.
What was the approximate date/time you last experienced the crash you described above?
@connor I think it was the same day as my last comment, or the day before that. So Aug 15-16.
Thanks!
@Chikolad thanks for getting back to us with that information. We’ll put a ticket in with our dev team to look into this for you.
Hi @Chikolad,
Thanks for your patience. From diagnostics, we can see there are still ongoing performance issues with ARC, and we’re continuing to investigate with development.
Please elaborate here if the symptoms in ARC have changed at all since updating to the latest build.
Hey @connor, there is indeed an improvement. If it makes any sense it started even before I updated to the latest ARC + core versions, so not sure what to make of it.
I appreciate the effort and will notify on any developments!
Thanks @Chikolad. We’ll let this thread close for housekeeping and retain it - please report any new issues with ARC in a new thread and we’ll follow up there.