My Roon Server is visible in Roon ARC via the Internet, status is green. When I click 'Connect', the initial synch starts. But after a few seconds, I see an error message: "Initial synch failed. Something went wrong while synching to your Roon server."
I've installed Roon ARC v1.0.59 on an iPhone with iOS v17.6.1. The Roon server version is 2.0 (build 1470), running on Windows 10.
Describe your network setup
I'm using an AVM FritzBox 7490. Internet connectivity is given. Using the Roon Remote app for streaming music from my Roon Server works within the local network, both for local music files and for Qobuz as a streaming service. No problems within the local network when using the Remote app from two different devices.
The Roon server runs with the Windows Defender firewall enabled. I _temporarily_ disabled the firewall, testing for the existence of inhibiting firewall rules, but with no positive effect. The error persisted.
Thanks for reaching out with your report and welcome to the forum! As the first step of troubleshooting, can you please try to delete and reinstall the ARC app? Does that help at all?
Yes, I had deleted and then installed Roon ARC anew. The Roon ARC configuration from last year did no longer match the Roon server software, resulting in a static error message saying so. The new installation had the positive result of seeing the server again and connecting to it. It is the first synch after the new installation that fails persistently.
Please compress (.zip) the entire RoonServer folder and upload it here.
The team has identified a RoonServer-side issue and a copy of the reproducing database will greatly expedite our investigation and subsequent fix. Thank you!
Hi @Mark_Sebastian,
Sorry for the long delay in replying. Thank you for uploading your database for us. Now our developers need to examine your database and create a fix. I cannot comment on an exact timeline. However we will let you know here when we know more or have released a fix. We appreciate your continued patience.
I’ve checked that the roon server and firewall are OK and when I check the server, it tells me that it is ready. I’ve configured my firewall to forward TCP and UDP to port 38043 so it looks like my firewall is configured correctly.
If I try and use my iPad I constantly cannot connect. I get the rather helpful “Something went wrong” error message on the iPad and that’s it.
I’ve tried logging out and logging in, tried using my iPhone and get the same message.
I’ve reinstalled the ARC app (it is set to auto update) but given the error message and the fact that the server tells me that ARC is ready, I’ve got no idea where to start debugging.
I have the same problem on both my iPads but Roon ARC works fine on my iPhone, even through I have Nord VPN running on my home router and the iPhone.
I have no idea what could be different on my iPads.
Yes, ARC is ready on the server side, else the iPhone wouldn’t be working with ARC.
NordVPN is active on the iPads as well as the iPhone.
ARC works fine on the iPhone (also with Carplay) but not on the iPads.
Well, if the reason it works had been the VPN on the iPhone, then it wouldn’t have to show Ready to work. You hadn’t mentioned that the VPN is on the iPads as well.
Thank you for your ongoing patience - this ticket is progressing through the pipeline, but we don’t yet have a fix prepared for release. We’ll post here as soon as we do.
In the meantime, we recommend you investigate whether you have any special characters (spaces in particular) in your Playlist names. The particular sync failure appears to result from an illegal character in the name of a Roon playlist.
There were, indeed, three playlists with space characters, one of these lists “Welcome to Qobuz” created automatically (by Roon or by Qobuz). I have now deleted these playlists. Now there is only one remaining playlist. Its name contains only regular 7-bit ASCII characters. I restarted Roon server and tried it again. But still no joy. The behaviour seems unchanged. The same error message appears after a few seconds.
When I noticed that the only remaining playlist was a smart playlist, I deleted that as well. After another restart of the Roon server, now without any playlists, the undesired behaviour persisted.
The symptom you’re encountering on this iPad is unrelated to port forwarding. Diagnostics indicate you’re facing a known issue for which Developers have a fix in the pipeline. I’ll merge your post shortly into the tracking thread where you can receive updates.
After some hours of extensive testing, I could narrow down the problem to a specific tag, named “Demanding”. When I deleted that tag, the initial synch worked, even after I reconstructed the tag and its content. Before I deleted the tag, I removed all links, making it an empty tag. But this alone did not suffice. I had to delete the tag itself.
You may consider my problem solved. If you would like to debug the problem and if you are not able to do so using the state of my database I uploaded 20 days ago, I can offer to upload a copy of the database in its corrupt state.
The tag had ingested into RoonServer with a space in front of the name, " demanding" , causing a parsing error.
Our next suggestion, which you’ve already identified independently, was to delete this tag to replace the erroneous control character.
Development has a ticket to fix the underlying parsing error, so we will keep this thread open. We shouldn’t require additional input but will ping here if we do - thank you again for your help.
