Downloading music to ARC is slow

Is roon perhaps converting the files?

I have exactly the same experience on my iPhone running iOS 16, it takes ages and seems to get stuck - I had to reset ARC to get it unstuck and then it went broken again - for now this is barely usable. My WiFi is very reliable and I have no issues on other Roon devices.

It would be also a good idea to add a setting to prevent phone from going into sleep when on Downloads tab (like Lightroom cloud has for instance).

There also doesn’t seem to be the option to convert files into lower quality, which would help to safe a lot of space on mobile.

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I get roughly 48mb/ downloads via arc. The device your using is a major factor. Phones are not designed for really fast large data transfers, they have limited memory and networking capabilities. That said ARC does fall short compared to copying same files via the iOS files app where I get 144mb/s. I expect currently it’s a compromise and may improve with further development.

As far as I know it’s all local if your own the same network as Roon core I also thought it was going via the internet but it’s not as if you disable port forwarding it still works locally.

I’ve noticed the same downloading one album. I can’t imagine how ling it would take to download many albums.

This would be a great feature! :+1:

I noticed the phone mustn’t be allowed to lock the screen, and the app must be in the foreground. Could this be the problem? When I finally realised the screen must be on, it downloaded 3.79GB in only a couple of minutes.

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For people here suggesting adding the option to transcode (e.g. compress downloaded files to a lossy format that I assume would be essentially 100% of the use case for such a feature) there is already a feature request posted for this so please go and vote for that feature since that is probably the best way to get it high up on Roon’s priority list. The feature request is here …

Option to convert downloaded files - Roon Software / Feature Suggestions - Roon Labs Community

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Can you quantify that? There’s no issue with networking. I get close to 500 Mbps download speeds on my iPhone 12 Pro Max over WiFi.

There is no issue with download speeds in Tidal and Netflix apps. And unlike Roon ARC which downloads from my local Roon Core, they download from the internet. Roon ARC shouldn’t really take half a day plus to transfer a few GB. I think there is something else going on.

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If Roon ARC uses FLAC then it shouldn’t need to do any conversions.

Thanks, I’ll try this.

oops … ARC!

understood … ONLY music from computer HDD is available to download on iphone under ARK

Got ARC working (iPHONE 12 pro max) … however, do not see the download icon or sign as shown in the support documentation :roll_eyes:

I have 350mb/s speed on my phone from my wifi and all I get on the phone is a max of 144mb/s so yes performance is hindered. Roon have said memory on the device is the main issue for them, I guess the app uses more than most in the first place who knows? But I agreed and said its not great and gave what speeds I get compared to Apples own files app which was a big difference.

It uses what the source is.

How are you measuring 144Mbps? I get close to 500Mbps when performing an internet speed test.

Anyway, what @Kris_M said is the issue. It downloads very fast if the iPhone is unlocked and the Roon ARC app is the foreground. I guess iOS severely throttles download speeds of background apps.

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Timing the actual data downloading. data size/time taken = actual data rate not speedtest which is not an accurate measure of consistent download speeds ever.

Yeah, in general internet speed can be quite variable, but I get consistently stable results close my ISP’s advertised speed (480Mbps).

Anyway, with the ARC app open, its downloading an album in approximately one minute which is way more than adequate for me. That translates to about 90Mbps, so surely there is some overhead in the Roon system, but acceptable.

I think on an average home wifi you will be averaging around 50MB/s download in real world use. I downloaded three albums today in total it took about 2 minutes, which seemed fine to me.

I have a ‘medium’ server, which may help, i,e 64gigs ddr4 ram on tap, 12 cores etc. Perhaps this has a bearing.

Watching the server stats as its downloading shows it raises CPU by only about 5% so I dont think this has a major effect to be fair.

I can see the download button when I click in to an album, but you should also be able to select to download the album from the three dots, representing the context menu for the album. Please note that it doesn’t seem like you can download individual songs, just complete albums. And please note that (from what I’ve read), you can only download local files and not albums you stream through Qobuz, for example.

I’ve experimented with this a bit.

When I download a single album, it downloads just fine - maybe not high speed, but wraps up in reasonable time and the download is stable.
However, when I schedule multiple albums to download (that I generally do typically when leaving home) this is when I get into trouble and the download freezes.

My hypothesis is that they all seems to start download at once, and that drives my Synology HDD drives crazy (because they are not SSD and do not like random reads when multiple downloads compete for the same HDD access).

The solution for that should be some throttling mechanizm inside ARC, of course assuming it works as I described. A workaround, annoying, is that you just download them one by one, after previous one was downloaded to the device.

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If you are using the Android app and are attempting to download a lot of albums at the same time, I have found that setting the battery usage to “Unrestricted” keeps the app from shutting down when you don’t have it open. Obviously, this uses more battery, but once you are done downloading, you can change it back to “Optimized”.

Long-press the ARC icon and select “App info”. Then click “Battery” and then select “Unrestricted”.

Hope this helps.

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As part of my playing around I downloaded a playlist with 4,530 320kbs AAC files in it with a total size of 43.5GB. My Roon Core was running on an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX with 32GB RAM & all the drives SSD and it was running Windows 11. Roon ARC was running on an iPhone 14 Pro Max. My Ryzen PC was hard wired to my router and my iPhone was connecting via WiFi and was about 2 metres away from the router with no obstructions between it and the router. I timed the download and it took 2 hours and 36 minutes. I changed the iPhone auto-off setting to “Never” before starting the download and about half way through I plugged the phone into a charger because the battery was draining fast enough that I was worried it might run out before the transfer completed. My phone also got quite hot but to Roon’s credit the whole transfer completed without Roon ARC crashing.

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