Current Android Tablets good for Roon

Roon Software Discussion Android
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Essentially, embedding an always on / quickly accessible remote viewer into my main control interface which is based around Home Assistant. To get rid of having to switch over to the Roon app for ‘pretty’ navigation. I can pause, play, skip and stuff from the Home Assistant interface but browsing tracks is ugly at best.

Sh*t I just realized this is harder to explain than I thought.

So on one of my local servers I’ll be running a VM either Windows or Linux, that runs the Roon desktop app and only that. In Home Assistant I have ‘tabs’ for various activities, like light control, media, my video library etc. I’ll add a new tab that acts as a remote desktop viewer (not sure if I’ll use RDP, VNC, etc) and connects to that VM instance. The trick right now is figuring out how to make it persistent so switching tabs is faster and doesn’t require ‘reconnecting’ to the remote session which adds a delay.
I personally prefer the desktop app vs the android one, and I’m used to manipulating desktop interfaces via touch tablets so this is a usability improvement from my perspective.

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42

Thanks for the clarification but it’s well beyond computer knowledge and skills. Nonetheless like you I have several Fire tablets which work great as Roon remotes and displays.

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I’ve picked up some Lenovo M8 tablets with a dock. On deal, I’ve gotten them @ $90 each. I’ve got one in every house for controlling Roon and other AV equipment. Worked fine for me.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/tablets/android-tablets/lenovo-tab-series/smart-tab-m8-google-assistant/len103l0006

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I got 2 Lenovo Smart Tab M10 Plus FHD with the intention of using them as Roon remotes. Love the dock that comes with them, however, color accuracy is way off and contrast is horrible. It crushes the blacks so much that it makes Roon experience not pleasant. Also, even that I got the ones with 4GB ram and 128GB storage, they are slow as hell so I ended repurposing them as photo frames. For Roon remotes nothing is better than iPads. For that I have an iPad Air 2020 and mini 6.

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I have a Galaxy Tab A 8.0 in the living room. I go back and forth between using it and my Pixel 5. For me the Pixel 5 is far more unreliable than the Tab. I can’t tell you how many times I have been using the Pixel, put it down for 30 seconds, picked it up only to see my phone trying to find the Core or just the pulsing Roon icon. The Tab rarely exhibits this behavior. My Window 10 PC’s are very stable and “get lost” even less than the Tab. I probably restart Roon on my Rock weekly at this point.

I have plenty of other services running on our network that don’t hang like this. Sony’s Bravia Core streams video at ~80 Mps with no glitches or timeouts through an entire two hour movie. Perhaps that’s because once it has an active connection it’s persistent enough that it doesn’t have to deal with a “new connection” handshake.

There are days that I wish there was a viable alternative to Roon and then there are other days I can’t imagine not having it.

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BTW Bravia Core’s picture quality is insane. The best I have ever seen in a home setting.

https://electronics.sony.com/bravia-core

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Yes, I sometimes have that experience with the Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 9.7, also. Usually, it then finds the core promptly, but occasionally not.

A new SDXC card did not cure the issue of poor refresh of album art, but the card needed relpacement anyway. I visited the device settings and put Roon in the “do not optimize” for battery category. Perhaps that will help – it’s too early to tell yet.

Desktop Roon (on Windows 10 Professional) is as trouble-free for me as any program. It never hangs, loses the core, or fails to refresh. It probably helps that, like my Roon Core, it’s connected to our LAN by Ethernet.

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I use a Huawei MP5 …works great as a controller

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The Do not optimize option works a treat for OnePlus phones and a couple of others. Lot’s of memory so that it can stay in memory is also a good start

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I have the same and Roon hasn’t crashed once for me in nearly one year of more or less daily usage, including some editing. No reconnecting issues either

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I use the Android Roon remote on my Pixel 3 phone and it runs great.

It seems some people indicate that there are remote features that are in desktop that aren’t in the Android mobile app. I would be curious to know what those are.

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Robert there are a few things that only run only on desktop/ tablet or or more feature rich on desktop/tablet.

You cannot see the song play count.
Manage bookmarks

There are more but I can’t remember them all

Android phone is fine for most uses though and it’s what I use 90% of the time.

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Hello - I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+ specifically to use as a roon remote, I chose mainly because I wanted as large a screen as possible. It replaced an iPad mini 4 which was just too slow at refreshing the screen and it was a bit small. The samsung has worked really well. I know many will think it overkill for just controlling a music system but from my perspective it works really well in terms of performance and screen quality.

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Watch a few YouTube videos and I think you can install vanilla Android on your Kindle instead. I originally planned on doing that but Roon is running fine on my Fire 10", so I haven’t bothered. The Kindle advert on wakeup, that you have to pay extra not to have, might persuade me to have a crack at this in the near future.

One thing I did do when I got the Kindle was to load the google play store on. It meant I was’t then limited to Amazon’s offerings and could have any app.

At £79 on special it was hard to beat.

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Let’s take a step back and look at the issue from a systems perspective.
First, you’ve not mentioned which Roon Controller operations are slow. I’m going to assume it is a search for an album or track. There’s a lot going on.

  • The controller forms the query
  • The controller sends the query to Core
  • Core retrieves the results set specified in the query
  • Core retrieves the results extended data
  • Core formats all this
  • Core sends the results back to controller to render it

First, is your WiFi up to snuff? Test it when Roon is working well. Test it when Roon is gagging. Is you Internet up to snuff. A lot of the metadata comes back from Qobuz or Tidal. and takes time to fetch. You can’t do a lot to speed them up. But medium tier cable Internet should be fine. Don’t fall for the Gigablast upsale.

Second Could your controller be starved for memory. You’ve not mentioned what it is, memory, storage, or operating system. I’d look here second. Check to see that there is uncommitted system memory first. If not, add memory. Fill it if you can afford it.

If you can use Linux for your Core’s host OS, do it. Linux is much better at doing real work than Windows 11 or 10. I’m a fan of System76 POP_OS and give them a few bucks a month. This is a free but timeconsuming activity. You’ll need new media for Linux so you can save your Roon DB. Linux can mount NTFS read only now. This option is for the brave.

Third, upgrade the storage. The Roon media database needs lots of IOPS. Basically, you add a fast SSD to your Roon Core host. Then make a backup of the database and restore it to the new storage. This looks straight forward. No harm done until you attempt the restore so be sure it is not empty, ran out of space, etc writing the backup. Bake sure the new disk is bigger than the backup.

Look for a fast 1 TB or so SAMSUNG EVO 960 SSD. The newer ones are faster. This is a read-mostly application so write wear is not really an issue here. Just make sure it is 2-3 times the size of what ou have in use and is as fast as budget permits. Drop the size and move up the speed chain. 980 is faster than 960 and 980 pro is about 1 million IOPS (I/O operations per second). Fast is good.

Basically following the Migrating to ROCK procedure as an example for preserving the Roon DB.

It looks like you can add 8 GB of memory and a 1 TB SSD for about the $260 budget you were setting.

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56

Have you considered a refurbished iPad? Apple just freshened everything so lots of people will be trading.

You can get deals on the high end stuff there but it is overkill for book and magazine reading and Roon Controller chores. You can pick up a new Apple iPad, the regular one just updated for $329. WiFi and base memory is fine for this service.

I have yet to curse at one, only when I drop one and bust the screen. Get an inexpensive Chinese case from Amazon. These are about a $20 item. Pick one with a raised lip so the screen doesn’t face plant on tile or hardwood. A 5 foot fall to hardwood will kill the screen.

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I use both a Samsung Tab S6 Lite and a Tab S7 FE. Both are fine. The S6 is smaller and easier to handle than the S7.

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Pulled the trigger on the AMAZON FIRE HD10 PRO. Wireless charging stand and tablet for $220. I am not sure how that can be beat

Great discussion. Thank you all.

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Thanks to everyone who has answered. I infer that opinions vary on a good solution. Apple sounds interesting, but an iPad won’t run BubbleUPnP, which I still use from time to time.

@David_Hamby asked about the system. The Core is an overspecified NUC: ROCK, NUC10i7FNH, 16GB RAM, Samsung 970 EVO Plus M.2 500GBSSD.

Renderer (Auralic Aries G1) and Core are on Ethernet. We have high-speed service with Comcast (theoretically Gbit), and I use a “smart” switch to prioritize the ports used for audio.

WiFi is through a good router (ASUS RT-AC88U), 5 yr old, all firmware updates applied, and still a current model. WiFi signal is very strong; the 5 GHz band is largely dedicated to the Roon Controller (tablet). Last time I checked by running the Aries via WiFi, there was no problem playing 96/24 files at least, maybe 192; I don’t remember.

The controller (Roon Remote) is a Samsung S2 9.7 with 32 Gb of internal storage, a large new SDXC card, and 3 Gb of RAM.

The intermittent slowness noted is failure to load album art and sometimes other metadata, or to display search results that query Qobuz. This may have improved after changing system settings.

I don’t want to use a phone as controller, because the cut-down Roon Remote for phones doesn’t have the play-count field. I find that invaluable as I work through large sets of, say, Haydn Symphonies or Scarlatti sonatas.

I am left believing that either the Samsung is too slow or memory limited, or that the ASUS router is nearing EOL and having intermittent trouble. But others have said that they use the same Samsung successfully; and I don’t note WiFi trouble on any other devices. Indeed, when I do use my phone, it has no problems. So it’s a puzzle, but one pointing towards the tablet.

I now have plenty of suggestions for tablets I could try. Before spending, I’ll try to borrow one and see if it works better.

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Your NUC configuration sounds good, Mike. Have you several controllers, for example, Roon on a laptop or desktop computer? Does it exhibit the same slowness at the same times of day that your tablet controller presents? This check will tell you if the trouble is your controller or a busy Roon and Qobuz.

How many Qobuz items are in your library? in comparison, I have about 2100 artists, 3400 albums, and 39,000 tracks indexed. The controller is a POP_OS Linux VM running under TrueNAS 12 FreeBSD distribution. The local media resides in a dataset in the TrueNAS primary storage pool. A second pool is used for TrueNAS backups, a third pool is used for Roon database backups. The machine is an Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1225 v5 @ 3.30GHz (modest as server parts go) on a SuperMicro workstation class motherboard having 32 GB of storage and a RAIDZ2 array that holds Time Machine backups, local media, and photos and videos.

This host is very responsive during the US Eastern mid-day. Queries complete in a second or two using a MacOS controller on the hard Ethernet. ISP is Cox mid-tier cable. In the evening, it is a bit slow talking to the iPad Mini controller over WiFi (Ubiquity In-Wall HD).

As the East Coast comes home and the UK is doing post-tea listening things slow down a mite. Album loads take longer than 5 seconds and I sometimes restart the controller iPad if it is really dragging.

At the risk of arousing the Android fans in the crowd, I’d recommend adding an iPad 64 GB version as a controller. These list for $329 new from Apple. My portable controller is an iPad Mini 5 64 GB version. In the evening, there is delay responding to album queries as noted above. Qobuz tracks are also slow to start playing. That’s the nature of the beast.

The primary reason I make this recommendation is that it is Apple and not a disinterested carrier pushing iPadOS updates to the iPad. Enable automatic updates and they happen over-night with only user action to say, ok, do it. You’ll be asked for your pass-key. That’s it. Apple just closed some zero-day exploits last night. Ars Technica is very good about announcing iOS and iPadOS updates.

I’m pretty cavalier about trying iPad software. If I were an Android tablet user, I’d not be so quick to try stuff. Google Play Store is a rough place compared to the Apple App Store. With Android there seems to be more burden on the user to keep the machine clean and up to date. Tablets shouldn’t be so bad as only Samsung is involved and there is no carrier experience enhancements to deal with.