Error 'Roon lost control of the Audio device' occurs (ref#K96B9Q)

telosman33 · July 16, 2026, 4:38pm

I’ve had a message that has started to pop up quite frequently on my Roon apps:

Could you kindly explain its meaning as I have not made any Schengen’s within my settings. This seems to have started after an update, but I cannot be one hundred percent sure.

telosman33 · July 16, 2026, 4:43pm

Last evening I went through a spell of my Nucleus One not running as intended - no power outages or issues with any other network dependent devices

As a side note, I think there should be a slight redesign on the Nucleus One - when we have one of our somewhat frequent power dropouts here, the Nucleus One obviously shuts down, but because of the nature of its design, you need to physically go and restart it through the power button. It should be design that on the continuation of power that it is in an “on” state and simply reboots.

benjamin · July 20, 2026, 10:45pm

Hey @telosman33,

Thanks for reopening this and for staying patient, and for doing the legwork on the SonosNet channel change and the move to WiFi-only.

We’ve just gone through a fresh set of your RoonServer logs (07/14–07/20), and there’s genuinely good news buried in the noise, plus a clearer picture of what’s left.

First, what’s improved. The bandwidth-starvation warnings that were driving the earlier “lost control” stops (the poor connection entries we kept citing) are completely gone in these logs. Just as importantly, the hard playback-stopping failures have stopped too, the last one was on 07/16 at 3:31 PM your time, and there hasn’t been a single one in the four days since. Your server also ran continuously without a crash or any memory problem, so the Nucleus itself is healthy. The channel move and WiFi-only switch did real work here.

What’s left is a different problem than the one we started with, and I want to be straight with you that it’s now pointing at the network rather than at Roon or at bandwidth. Two things stand out:

Your remotes and Roon-based endpoints keep changing IP addresses. The logs show Roon repeatedly losing contact with devices ("connection refused," "no data received") because they've moved to a new address and Roon is still trying the old one. This is what's behind the sluggish apps, the loss of control over the queue/volume, and very likely the new pop-up you mentioned. This is classic mesh-network behavior.
Sonos groups containing the Kitchen 5 and the Move 2 are still dropping and reconnecting constantly, far more than any other combination. They recover without stopping the music now, but they're the source of the staggered starts and speakers falling out of a zone after a pause.

Here's what I'd suggest next, roughly in order of impact:

Set DHCP reservations (static IPs) for everything, the Nucleus, every Sonos, and every device you use as a Roon remote, in your Nokia router. This should be the single biggest improvement, because it stops the address-shuffling that's breaking control.
Confirm band-steering / "smart connect" is actually turned off on the Nokia, and if it offers any multicast or IGMP option, let's try toggling it.
Kitchen 5 test: for a few days, try leaving the Kitchen 5 out of your groups. It's the most frequent offender in the logs by a wide margin, and because it's a first-gen unit it can't run current firmware. I'm not asking you to replace it, I just want to measure how much of the remaining churn is tied to it.
Living Room pair: this one's still showing 2.4 GHz coverage drops. If you can, hardwire one of the Fives to your switch (star topology, not daisy-chained like before).
Next time the new pop-up appears, note the exact wording and the time/date. I can already see clusters of these connection failures in the logs and can line them up precisely once I have a timestamp from you.

If you're able to do the DHCP reservations and the Kitchen 5 test, send a fresh set of logs afterward and I'll compare directly. I think we're closing in on this. 👍

telosman33 · July 22, 2026, 4:23pm

Thank you for going through the logs once again. I’d really like this system to be absolutely stable and enjoyable as I invested in Roon as a lifetime membership hoping to enjoy all the musical and metadata advantages it offers.

If I have it correct, my system now has static IP addresses for all devices associated with Roon - please confirm with the screenshot below. I have also removed the old Kitchen Play 5 from Tanya grouping as per your request - a bit of a shame that the older unit can not be updated to run smoother. I will be trying a grouping of the Media Room, Living Room and Move 2 to see how stable that can be, as that is a grouping I’d prefer to have playing, but have avoided as we have been going through this. When I get a chance to hardwire one of the Living Room Play 5’s, I will inform you.

I’m not sure if I mentioned this in the past, but my Nokia router is a rental from my service provider and I know some settings are “locked out” when they program the routers before sending to customers. Having said that, I have not been able to locate any option concerning band steering or smart connect, but will look further.

telosman33 · July 22, 2026, 6:43pm

As per your request - I received the message “Program notifications are unavailable because the notification permission was denied. Roon may be less reliable when the app is in the background on some devices”

Also, things had been running smoothly for a couple of hours within the zone group Move 2 / Living Room / Media Room until about 2:15 EST when things dumped;

I could not just hit play again after closing the app and restarting it - I had to choose a new source of music - The Creatures / Boomerang

telosman33 · July 22, 2026, 6:45pm

I just notice upon restating that I lost the Media Room from the original grouping I made.

benjamin · July 27, 2026, 8:57pm

Hey @telosman33,

Thanks for the updates and for making the static-IP and Kitchen 5 changes, those were exactly the right moves, and I can see their effect.

But the new logs surfaced something my 07/20 review couldn’t have caught, because it was looking at an earlier window (07/14–07/20). The set we juste reviewed covers 07/22–07/27, and it points to a different culprit for the recent hard stops.

During this window, RoonServer on your Nucleus ran out of memory and was shut down and restarted by the system three times:

07/22 at 2:16 PM your time
07/24 at 3:30 PM
07/27 at 8:08 AM

Each time, the server had grown to about 3.2 GB of RAM, essentially the full ~4 GB the Nucleus One has, and the operating system stepped in and restarted it. That restart is what you experienced as the "Waiting for your Roon Server" spinner, and it lines up precisely with the group that "dumped" on 07/22: your screenshot shows that exact moment, with "The Creatures – Untiedundone" as the track, which matches what the log was playing when the server went down. So at least some of what's felt like the app losing control has actually been the server itself restarting underneath you.

The good news from these logs: the bandwidth-starvation warnings we chased earlier are gone, and there’s no sign of a disk, database, or hardware fault, the machine is otherwise clean. The issue is simply that your library (~50,000 tracks) combined with TIDAL and streaming to several zones at once is pushing memory past what the Nucleus One’s 4 GB can hold, roughly every couple of days.

With that, our team is also on the cusp of releasing yet another handful of memory related optimizations that could very well help with your oom’s here, as your library size isn’t close to hitting they typical ceiling of a Nucleus One (~100k tracks).

Is a large portion of your library classic music?

You could always explore the idea of upgrading your RAM to 8GB on the Nucleus One, but I’d also wait for the next full Production update, as that could very well be the longterm solution for you here.

Thanks again for being so willing to get to the bottom of this!

telosman33 · July 28, 2026, 3:53pm

To answer the question about what is in my library, firstly if you are saying classical music, there is pretty well no releases within that category. I believe there is at least 600 CD’s that I had on a hard drive that is now on the Nucleus, and then the aforementioned Tidal collection which seems to be quite extensive. In the future, I will be wanting to digitalize an album collection (approximately 1,300) and add it to my Nucleus. From what you are saying, it seems I will be running into an issue at that point - am I correct?

Do you have any information on upgrading the onboard RAM from 4Gb to the 8Gb you mentioned? And curious, why with the potential size of a music data base that Roon users could easily have, is the Nucleus shipped with a limiting 4Gb of memory?

telosman33 · July 28, 2026, 4:10pm

Also, have you any insight into why I am continually seeing the message “Playback notifications are unavailable because the notification permission was denied. Roon may be less reliable when the app is in the background on some devices”?

noris · August 4, 2026, 3:37pm

Hello @telosman33 ,

We have just released a new build of Roon that contains performance improvements. Please try the newest release and let us know if you are noticing improvements on your end, thanks!

telosman33 · August 5, 2026, 2:52pm

I have done the update, but still have seen the message “Playback notifications are unavailable because the notification permission was denied. Roon may be less reliable when the app is in the background on some devices” Can you please inform me as to why this message has started to appear regularly.

Also, some insight into upgrading the onboard Nucleus from 4Gb to 8Gb please. If it’s an easy, affordable and logical upgrade, I wouldn’t mind implementing it.