Just got Roon a few days ago and so far very satisfied with the product, but after finding out about the limitations it appears that in order to use the roon app on a laptop both at home and at the office I must do some tinkering, and Tailscale seems to be a good option.
However, after installing it on both my home synology NAS (on which the roon server is running) and my laptop (a 2022 macbook pro) and adding them to the same tailnet the Roon app doesn’t find the roon server when I’m outside of my home wifi.
I think there may be some steps that I missed, could you please help me with that?
Roon isn’t supported over a VPN and won’t work consistently with Tailscale . Remotes can see the core but If you’re using your laptop to playback it will be intermittent if Roon sees it to play to or not. Roon is designed for a flat single network usage.
You need to get Roon remote to use its Tailscale ip address to connect which you can force it to do so. Also find its best to set all devices in Tailscale to use the same subnet.
Out of home access is best done using Roon ARC app and Roon and you can use Tailscale on iOS or Android devices to bridge them or use port forwarding on your router if your ISP supports it.
In roon you have to force it to see the tailscale ip of the server or its trying to look over your local network.
Also you works network may well block the traffic.
Connect to new server the when you get to this screen click on help and type in its tailscale ip. But as I said it likely wont work as Roons audio pipeline and discovery of playback zones are not built to work over a VPN. It may find it once and then it drops off and wont work again. The remote will work fine but not the audio side of things I find it too temperamental to rely on. As it may work one minute the next not.
My understanding is that Tailscale is a level 3 VPN, and so does not forward the network discovery packets that roon uses on a lan for clients and servers to find each other.
So basically you can’t use regular roon over Tailscale. ARC is no problem.
You can use roon over a level 2 VPN - although it’s some work to set up.
I have both - Tailscale is much richer and easier to setup - but I can access roon when needed.
But it does sometimes but then it can also disappear as mysteriously as it appears. It did just this earlier when I was taking screen grabs. Same happens when I use my work Mac at home. It’s on separate vlan on my network to Roon but I use it as remote quite happily, but occasionally the audio of the remote is available to enable and other times it’s not. Can’t explain why it has this behaviour at all.
Soft ether does a pretty good job, and it does also work for endpoints.
But it’s still not 100% reliable - probably Roon’s timeouts etc are designed for a lan, not a wan. So I ended up putting roon servers in both my locations.
Obviously ARC is a better solution if it does what you need!
I tried to force the tailscale IP the you indicated @CrystalGipsy and it worked indeed, I was able to connect to my roon server but unfortunately my mac audio peripherals were not detected so it makes roon totally useless on this device lol (see before and after bridging)
Update: just tried ZeroTier, the other alternative and I actually managed to make it work!
After some painstaking set up on my NAS (fortunately they provided some good documentation) I successfully brigded my two devices, and cherry on top the roon app was able to detect instantly the server while I was on 5G cellular!
Hence, the macbook audio outputs now appears in the playback zone and I was able to stream some hi-res contents
It remains now to see how this tinkering holds up over time…
One thing is for sure, Tailscale goes directly to trash!
