Sadly, arc has been and continues to be unreliable. I Spend more time trying to get it to work than listening to music with it. 
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Just a more general question to those using ARC rather regularly. At what locations and in which regions with mobile data do you listen to “HiRes”/CD quality through ARC with near-zero dropouts?
The big one is reliability. Plexamp works every single time I use it.
It’s much, much faster, and search is great. Sonic Adventure is fun and a good way to surface forgotten music. The various DJ modes are fun on car trips. (image)
I have it hooked to Tidal, but I also have a massive personal library.
The fact that it preloads as much music as I want it to means that it doesn’t stall or buffer if I drive through a no-cell zone.
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I agree that the other fish are important as well, but the poll here has 63% of voters using ARC at least monthly and more than 50% weekly or daily. Admittedly it’s self selecting, but it does look like it’s not insignificant and needs attention, too. (And it already took too long to get it working as it was)
And the episode with ARC frequently crashing the core was also just an issue because people were using it, or trying to.
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I’ve wanted to use arc as my mobile streaming app of choice but there are far too many bugs and limited features that means I just don’t bother reaching for it. There are numerous apps now that have amazing features like AutoEQ presets built in. I also prefer consuming new music through playlists on Tidal but I can’t even access that through arc.
I know there are people who know exactly what they want to listen to and when but that’s not me. Musical inspiration takes me in a lot of different directions and anything that helps me do that is what I will ultimately end up using.
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Exactly the reason I didn’t want to use it and risk disabling Roon whilst my wife was using it and I was away from home and couldn’t fix it.
Sure, and it sucked. But nevertheless it is evidence that people had an interest in using it. Otherwise, nobody would have cared about using ARC crashing the core.
roon’s most important hope regarding ARC was that it would create more subscriptions. I’m not sure in how far they make critical business decisions by mainly reading some threads here. You could also argue that there are many other messages here about problems or needs regarding the core of the roon system which are still present. Not so much paying attention to this creates a certain risk of more subscriptions being cancelled. Deciding in favor of developing ARC was a very high risk. Not doing so may be as well.
roon customers without ARC are already paying customers. And those are for sure of a certain type. Believing that introducing ARC would create additional subscriptions thus more/new customers was maybe a bit naive. Because for ARC a stationary roon core is necessary, right? And who would invest in such who is only interested in ARC?
I don’t know that, nor do I know how their growth looked before and after ARC.
But what I know for sure is that mobile Roon was the #1 feature request and they delivered on it. On this forum though, they can’t do anything right.
True. Though I always have problems really judging how widespread the problems are. If I didn’t read the forum, I’d think that I had 3+ years of perfect service from it, without problems (talking about home Roon, not ARC), apart from bugs and limitations like every software has them.
Not if they became Roon customers because they liked getting ARC with it, or at least the idea of it. And that’s another thing I don’t have any data on.
To repeat, I have zero data on that.
Probably no-one, but maybe there were people who had been on the edge, or people who newly learned about Roon, who considered getting a mobile solution with it a good proposition. Once again, zero data that would allow me to judge rationally.
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It’s not that they can’t do anything right. It’s that they have great ideas and execute them poorly, and ignore obvious requirements, which irritates people. They act as though they know better than their customers 100% of the time; they may be right 80%. Their transparency is poor, they leave crumbs which lead to speculation that does them no good, they spend resources adding features instead of sorting out the bugs and the problems. The idea of Roon is at least twice as great as the reality. I believe their reach exceeds their grasp.
Hope this will change in the future.
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That’s a part of it, I agree. And the atrocious [*] support. But then there are also the people who try to run it on a laptop with 2 million tracks and then post a thousand times how crappy it all is.
For me, it has been pretty great - although I do have my annoyances. But then I think back to suffering with the horribly simplified other apps and I am happy again.
[*] Edit: It has kept bugging me to have written it like that. I think the team does a great job with the resources they have. It’s just that users having to wait for weeks in some cases to get attention is far too long and understandably causes unrest.
Maybe, but maybe 80% is a better rate than customers would have. I read the feature suggestions and many make sense but are clearly impossible, others are terribly thought out, and then there are also those who would be doable and dearly missed. But I won’t put percentages on it. Anyways, it’s a bit the life of being a software developer, people always hate you.
I can agree, but then there’s complaints if they do and if they don’t
Another thing I find difficult to judge with the missing data i have. I mean yeah, there’s a whole lot that dearly needs fixing and keeps lingering, which is super annoying. On the other hand, if you put a gun to my head and asked me “ARC or these 20 bugs you hate”, I am not sure what I would have decided. I like ARC a lot by now, as aggravating as the journey was.
Working in small-mid size software development myself, I can tell you that it is very bad for my health if I look at 15 year old bugs in our database. But then, they hit 1 person a year if at all, and fixing them all would stall new features for a decade. So you have to make judgement calls and sometimes you get them right and other times you fail miserably.
Ideally, they would have resources for all of it. So let’s hope for Harman/Samsung 
I can agree with this as well, but it’s also something I know too well from work. And yet, our customers prefer that we exist and we make a million people happier and they pay for it, so.
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Yes, very happy with ARC. Living in the Netherlands with top internet (5G) everywhere. Using it multiple times every week with a iPhone 14 Pro in combination with a Lotoo PAW S1 DAC en Shure 535 IEMs.
Sorry for being a bit OT. I can’t fully agree on that 
. In my professional life I sometimes even love developers for their work. But sometimes, developers are a bit alone, if there’s no one telling them clearly what concrete and detailed requirements to implement and to think about at what priority, in a proper communication. The worst requirement is the one that makes rather less sense and is implemented by a developer with a smile on his/her face
The final responsibility is always with some sort of IT project or product manager. Rather ambiguously defined requirements, heavy time pressure and insufficient QA mostly lead to unsatisfactory implementations.
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I know, but one needs to keep telling that to oneself. In real life, people do sometimes mention it and it makes us happy to get an email like that maybe once a day or week, but most of the time it’s complaints all day long and its aggravating I am not a dev myself though, anymore, but in support. But then the developers get the complaints by proxy from us.
In a not very large company (we were about the size of Roon for a long time and now maybe 3 times as large or so), the segregation isn’t that strong. It’s great in a way to be very close to users, but it also means that a dev can’t just say “I just followed orders”.
And there’s always inevitable pressures when big and important customers need something and have timelines, not out of spite but because their life is difficult as well. We try to not succumb to that, but it’s not always possible if things in the OS change or you can get a new customer with 30K seats if you deliver this and that until day X.
Edit: But getting off topic now. It’s just that I have many soft spots for Roon
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Daily happy user here. Satisfied at a basic level. But there are some issues to be solved like dongles, sorting albums of an artist and Android Auto. The last works too but missing album art makes it difficult to use while driving… Overall I would rate the app a 7-.
I use it daily. Some days I have to travel in the back roads of Nova Scotia where cell service in some places is just a rumour so I do use the download when I know I will be in such an area. Initially I had sone problems but as ARC has matured they have become much less frequent. My only complaint is that roon has not still implemented bookmarks in ARC, a feature I regularly use in roon itself. I use ARC with Android Auto and I have never had a problem. I care little about seeing the album cover - I am mostly looking at the road after all and the cover doesn’t tell me what track is playng - and in any case half or all the screen is taken up with Google Maps or Waze.
Roon Arc was the large selling point for me in the end. I already had all my music on an external SSD & I wanted to get into a NAS for plex & streaming all my ripped shows. Roon announcing Arc & giving me the ability to easily access that music that was already at home was a large selling point. I considered plex amp & was sold by the interface of Roon. Wound up finding a NAS version of Roon & put that SSD in the NAS & I’ve happily been using Roon for months now. The ability to listen to the same music from my amp at my desk & my phone on the go is infinitely satisfying. Excited to see the previous update for ARC which improved downloads, I think they still have a long way to go.
I even recently received a survey on ARC asking about ARC’s performance, I was happy to provide my input including ARC turning my phone into a space heater during painfully slow downloads on my iPhone.
For some context I live & work in NYC, I take the subway multiple times a day and sometimes the Metro North upstate. I listen through a new Moondrop Dawn Pro & my balanced IE200 IEMs, Really enjoying the experience ARC provides me with my own music. ARC is now my daily music player.
The second I enter the subway I turn ARC into offline mode & I have very few issues, When exiting I usually turn it back off & once & a while need to restart the app.
Busses are a pleasure when using ARC as I never really loose signal.
I’m not sure but when I forget to turn it offline I think the app transfers seamlessly to downloaded music, either that or its always playing downloaded version as Ive downloaded most of my library onto my phone.
Some critiques I have of Roon/Arc are listed below:
- Roon- When downloading items on my PC(Games on Steam) my music/ Roon itself can cut out on the PC or other devices. This shouldn’t happen I have 1gbps network at home & it’s not even stressed.
- ARC- Phone turns into a space heater when downloading music,
- ARC- Download Speeds, feels like dial up.
- ARC- My Library Tab is poorly thought out & is just list after list, I would like a way to either change the default section of this page into one of the sub categories. Should allow for grid view as well besides list.
- ARC- Muse does not need its own tab, leave it as the button on top right of screen. Replace this tab with another customizable spot, from the my Library Tab.
- Roon/ARC- Allow EQ profiles to be transferred in-between, Also allow imports of equalizer profiles from other applications such as Peace APO.
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No. I wanted to. I really wanted to. I tried. I really tried. But alas, it was too unreliable, too quirky, and missing basic roon features.
So I gave up and now just use Tidal mobile app, or Poweramp with the the 2500 tracks downloaded to my phone via JRiver. They work 100% reliably.
(So did spotify, apple music, and even plexamp when I tried them.)
I saw that there have been recent improvements to arc and was mildly interested, but then I saw that a big improvement was “smart downloads.” What even is that and who even asked for it?
No, does not work for me, and never will because I intentionally put up a firewall to external internet traffic.