Hey Everyone,
In this Early Access release, we are excited to announce a couple of significant changes our team has been working on: we’ve rebuilt CarPlay and Android Auto from the ground up to make in-car listening more reliable.
We’ve also redesigned waveforms so the shape of the music is easier to see, and fixed an issue where high-resolution streaming tracks didn’t show waveforms during playback. Along with that several fixes for tvOS 27 issues were included to sync with the production track.
Before you start: Please update Roon on both your Roon Server and your Remote devices. Some improvements in this release need both sides on the same version. If they don’t match, some screens, like album pages, may not load. If something doesn’t look right, please check the versions first before reporting it. Apologies in advance for any inconvenience it might cause.
CarPlay and Android Auto
For many of you, the car is where you listen to Roon every day, and it hasn’t been as reliable as it should be. Roon didn’t always reconnect after a stop, and sometimes you had to force-quit the app to get your music back. Album art could go missing or show the wrong image, and the screen didn’t always match what was actually playing. We kept fixing these issues one by one, but new ones kept appearing because the root cause was in how the car apps were built.
So instead of patching it again, we rebuilt both from the ground up. That fixes whole groups of these problems at once and gives us a stronger base to keep improving on.
The screens look mostly the same, but the experience should feel smoother and more dependable. Roon reconnects more reliably when you get back in the car, album art shows up correctly, and what you see on screen matches what you hear. On Android Auto, we’ve also made browsing easier and improved voice search.
Cars and phones vary a lot, so your feedback on CarPlay and Android Auto is especially valuable.
Waveform implementation
We’ve redesigned how waveforms are drawn on the seek bar. Before, quiet recordings, including much classical music, appeared as a low, flat line, and loud modern masters filled the bar as a solid block, so in both cases it was hard to see the shape of the music. Waveforms are now scaled so the dynamics of each track are clearly visible, whatever its loudness. This applies to every waveform, whether the track is local or streaming, and to waveforms in shared images. You don’t need to do anything: existing waveforms switch to the new style right away.
This release also continues the work we started in 2.73 on bringing waveforms to streaming tracks, whether or not they’re in your library. Hi-res streaming tracks now show waveforms during playback.
We’ve also fixed a problem with mono tracks, which are common in historical recordings, reissues, and spoken-word content. Their waveforms were drawn too low, and some passages could appear silent when they weren’t. Unlike the redesign above, this fix applies only to tracks analyzed from now on, so older mono tracks in your library may still look slightly off.
If you spot a track with a missing or odd-looking waveform, let us know which track it was and, for streaming, which service. That helps us track down the remaining cases.
Thank you for your continued testing and support!
The Team at Roon Labs
Build Numbers
| Application | Build |
|---|---|
| Roon / RoonServer | 2.74 (build 1704) earlyaccess |
| Roon Remote (iOS / Android) | 2.74 (build 1704) earlyaccess |
| Roon ARC | 1.84 (build 429) earlyaccess |
Changes
- Improved input switching for Devialet devices by extending response wait time to 45 seconds
- Fixed issues caused by tvOS 27 release
- Fixed an issue where high-resolution streaming tracks failed to display waveforms during playback
- Fixed an issue where RAAT zones could become unresponsive after a device wake from standby
- Fixed an issue where the Roon Server Offline page in Roon ARC showed a broken image in light mode
- Fixed an issue where Roon Radio in Roon ARC did not display the seed information for the session
- Fixed an issue where duplicate tracks in playlists appeared as playing simultaneously in the UI
- CarPlay integration rewrite
- Android Auto integration rewrite
- Waveform improvements
- Various minor bug fixes and improvements
Installation
| macOS | Roon | |
| Windows | Roon | |
| Linux † | Easy Installer | Full Package |
| Nucleus / ROCK | See Help Center | |
| Android APKs | Roon | Roon ARC |
† Information on loading Roon on Linux can be found here. Please use the files linked here in place of those from the help center article when loading earlyaccess.