Hi @telosman33 ,
We wanted to check in, if you are back and have any updates to share on this issue, please do let us know, thanks!
I would say overall the system is much more stable - I’m even able to combine Sonos speakers that you recommended against combining in a group and experience pretty seamless playback. I typically like having the Media Room, Move 2 and Kitchen 5 grouped as a zone for typical daily use, and have been doing so. I would still like if you could check logs and see if there are any anomalies. A couple of questions:
I have quite a few devices on my WiFi network, so if I’m able to install an unmanaged bridge and hardwire what I can into it (outside of Sonos speakers), could that possibly help with the overall Roon performance?
If when hard wiring devices into the network, if I could include any Sonos speakers would that help, or is it best to keep them all on WiFi? As previously stated, I removed all my speakers from SonosNet and placed them on WiFi only.
I am still consistently receiving the playback notification unavailable message - have you found the cause?
Hi @telosman33,
Thanks for the update. The fresh logs (09/12–09/21) are the healthiest set we’ve seen from your system.
Hard stops are down to three in nine days (09/18 11:28 AM, 09/19 7:53 PM, 09/21 12:02 PM your time, the last one recovered on its own). Bandwidth starvation is gone. The Living Room channel drops have stopped: 397 on 09/13, one or two a day since. The loopback problem we flagged in June is resolved. Your SonosNet migration is confirmed clean on all eight speakers, Wi-Fi only, 5 GHz channel 161. Firmware updated system-wide on 09/18; seven of eight are on 97.1, with Kitchen 5 at 86.10, as far as a first-gen Play:5 goes.
One event that wasn’t Roon: on 09/12 the server went dark at 6:32 PM and returned at 9:15 PM with no IP address, and five Sonos speakers rebooted in the same minute. That seems more like a house power outage, and it accounts for the 09/13 spike above. A small UPS on the Nucleus and router would remove that entirely, and solve the restart-after-power-loss annoyance you raised in July.
Two unrelated things:
The Media Room + Move 2 + Kitchen 5 group. All three hard stops were this group, plus ~1,400 disconnect-and-recover rounds underneath. Sonos keeps shifting the coordinator between Move 2 and Kitchen 5 and Roon’s view lags behind; on 09/18 the re-form failed outright with Kitchen 5 as master. Playback survives most of it now, which is why it feels better, but it’s the same coordinator problem as before.
Your iPhones and iPad this ties to your notification message. Roon lost contact with your three remotes 865 times in nine days; one iPhone went through 133 separate two-minute reconnect cycles. That’s what an iOS app suspended in the background looks like from the server side. Roon asks for notification permission specifically so iOS keeps that connection alive, with it denied, iOS suspends the app, and what you see coming back is the spinner and the dead queue and volume controls. The pop-up is still a known issue our team is fixing, but on your system it’s pointing at something real. Please enable notifications for Roon on all three devices.
Also: your DHCP reservations hold perfectly for all eight Sonos speakers, but two iOS devices changed address on 09/16. That’s Private Wi-Fi Address rotating the MAC your reservation is keyed to, turn it off per device in iOS Wi-Fi settings, then re-do those reservations.
Your questions:
Unmanaged switch for non-Sonos devices? Yes, good move. Use an unmanaged gigabit switch, not a bridge or extender (a bridge adds a wireless hop and works against you). Star topology off the router, nothing daisy-chained, same subnet as the Nucleus. Every device off Wi-Fi frees airtime on the channel all eight speakers share.
Any Sonos on the switch? No, keep them all on Wi-Fi. This reverses what we suggested in July, because of the work you’ve done since: wiring any single Sonos speaker turns SonosNet back on for your whole system, putting you back in the mixed-transport setup that was breaking things in June. It’s all or nothing, and all isn’t practical. The Living Room drops have stopped on Wi-Fi anyway.
One test: swap Kitchen 5 out of that daily group for a few days and use the Attic or Bedroom instead, not permanently, just so we can measure how much of the remaining churn is tied to the one speaker that can’t run current firmware. Do that alongside the notification and Private Wi-Fi Address changes; we’ll check fresh logs, and we’ll compare against this baseline.
Thanks again, Tom.
Hi @telosman33,
How are things performing on Roon 2.73? Any change in the symptoms you’re experiencing?
I’ve noticed quite good streaming in the past little while - in fact, I was away for the weekend, and left the Roon streaming to test if it would drop out, and it did not. That included a grouping with the Kitchen 5, Move 2, Living Room and Media Room.
Currently, my iPhone is set to “Fixed” on its “Private Wi-Fi Address” - will this alleviate the issue mentioned, or is it best to turn it completely off? I have just turned “Private Wi-Fi Address” off on my iPad - I do not have the option of “Fixed” in its iOS, but it’s an older iPad running 17.7.11 and I don’t believe I can go beyond that. The second iPhone you see dropping out and reconnecting may be my partner’s, so I will have to check the settings later on.
Will a memory upgrade on my Nucleus still be advantageous to me at this point?
Thanks again for all the attention. I hope your work on my system helps alleviate possible issues other Roon users could have when incorporating Sonos into their systems.
Can you please have a look at the logs from Thursday October 1st for dropouts on my groupings. I had previously grouped my whole house together and listened pretty seamlessly the day before, but Thursday was an issue. Two events that could have precipitated the issues was firstly, the Roon update I installed Thursday, or the outside possibility of a modem replacement that was completed Wednesday evening. I am leaning away from it being the modem as it should not have any impact on any router settings that affect the Sonos speakers. In fact on Wednesday when my Nucleus was running fine, I only had download speeds around 100Mbps, and not the typical speed of around 1Gbps that I see now.
Roon stopped playing today sometime around 1:30 est. On both my iPad, and iPhone the app showed music playing on a few speakers, but there is absolutely no sound output.
Hi @telosman33,
Thank you for the report and for the timestamps.
Here’s what the logs show for that particular date (oct 1):
~9:23 AM: Your whole-house group formed. Move 2 joined at 10:13. Disconnect activity began here; the logs were clean overnight.
~12:37 PM: Four speakers dropped out of the group within about three seconds of each other.
~12:44 PM: The Roon update was installed and the server restarted.
~2:24 PM: The group split again. Living Room and Media Room dropped out.
~6:15 PM: The only full playback stop of the day, on Kitchen 5 + Move 2 + Living Room + Media Room, during “Try Again Today” by The Charlatans. The speakers reported they were playing, but the track never advanced, so Roon ended the stream.
The Roon update itself is unlikely to be the cause, because the dropouts started about three hours before it was installed. There were also no bandwidth warnings. The pattern points to the Sonos speakers regrouping on their own, usually a sign of a network change, so the modem replacement is the more likely trigger. Could you confirm your DHCP reservations survived the swap?
We also have some major Sonos and AirPlay improvements in progress for upcoming releases, which we hope will improve how Roon handles these events.
As a side note, we noticed another server restart, likely due to memory pressure, on Oct 3. We’ve passed that to engineering as part of their ongoing work.
Thanks again, and it’s our hope to stabilize this for you soon.
As for you last note on “memory pressure” - an unanswered question was whether a memory upgrade on my Nucleus would still be advantageous to me at this point?
I did a modem swap, but there were no changes to any router settings, and all IP reservations for the Sonos speakers remained in effect. I will be doing another modem swap in the next few days, as my provider shipped me the identical modem that has known overheating issues.
Yesterday and today I have had a lot of issues with my music not streaming smoothly with a lot of dropouts during playback - to the extent I considered using my nemesis Sonos app to control streaming as this is ironed out. Sadly, everything had been running quite smoothly until a couple of days ago.
Even after allowing notifications on my iPad, when I open the Roon app, I have constantly been seeing the message “Waiting for Roon” as the circle spins. I have been forced to close, then restart the app on multiple occasions.
Hi @telosman33,
Thank you for your patience. We’ll review logs to determine if all of these symptoms are caused by memory pressure or have separate causes. To answer your question directly concerning a memory upgrade, you shouldn’t be experiencing memory-related symptoms with a library this size on the Nucleus One unless the library itself contains an order of magnitude more metadata than expected. The Nucleus One generally specs up to 100k tracks without issue.
That said, we recommend you hold off upgrading for now until we pinpoint the problem you’re experiencing and release a fix. Upgrading RAM might relieve it temporarily, but not if the library is growing.
We’ll update our recommendation as we work through the case with devs. Please stand by and we’ll share an update as soon as possible on the status of these internal efforts.