Pi4 with Ropiee 4.010 (Beta) - USB - Chord Electronics Qutest
Library Size
20,789 tracks
Description of Issue
Roon has become borderline unusable for me recently. I have experienced periods of skipping tracks via Tidal before (for which I’ve attributed to my less-than-stellar 4G broadband) but recently it’s even been happening with local media.
Sometimes the music will just seem to ‘mute’ whilst the progress bar in Roon continues and then it returns after a few seconds, other times it will give me a message about the file loading slowly and possibly being a hardware problem then skipping to the next track.
It’s really spoiling my enjoyment at the moment and I’d be grateful if someone could chime in here.
Thanks.
Edit: forgot to mention that this is even after router, rock and Pi have been rebooted.
This sounds very much like a network issue. Can you connect a PC/Mac or phone with an adapter to the RPi’s ethernet cable and check your ping times, upload and download speeds to your router?
Hey @norliss, in addition to Graeme’s suggestions, I’d also try connecting the Chord directly to the Core via USB, bypassing the Pi altogether. Does that work better?
Hi - I haven’t been able to do anything today but hopefully will be able to over the weekend.
Funnily enough I have considered re-locating the Core downstairs and connecting the DAC directly to it since if at least the local content played without hindrance that would most likely point to a networking problem either with the router, one of the switches or the powerline gear.
We typically recommend against using powerline networking adapters. We’ve seen them cause problems in the past and are generally just not very reliable. Seeing how things work without them in the mix is definitely a good idea!
Haven’t been able to do any trouble-shooting or re-location of the core yet but here’s something I’ve noticed: that Roon server seems to be restarting itself.
Traditionally, whenever I look at the rock.local, the server seems to keep running and its up-time basically trails the up-time of the OS by about 10seconds i.e. it stays running unless I reboot it (or the core itself).
However a few times of late I’ve noticed that the server has re-started itself without my intervention. In fact a little earlier I looked and saw that whilst the rock itself has been running for nearly 2 days (i.e. since I manually rebooted the NUC) Roon server has only been running for less than 2 hours…
I have the EXACT same problem after my Synology DS720+ (with 10G RAM and running Roon server on a SSD) is upgraded to DSM7 and reinstalled the Roon Server with Chris’ Roon Server for DSM7 Beta (dated 0 August 2021).
Most tracks cannot start playing BUT i noticed that the “spectrum” like icon is moving and indicating that it is supposed to be playing. Sometimes, it will automatically keep skipping to another track (but still nothing plays it just keeps skipping to the end of the album).
This has been going on for over a week. VERY annoying!
The next time you notice that RoonServer has restarted, can you make a note of the time you notice it and then use the directions found here and send us over a set of logs using a shared Dropbox link (or any other file sharing service)? Thanks!
I moved the core as discussed above. It isn’t connected directly to the DAC in lieu of the Pi; I thought I’d just try moving it to the ‘other side’ of the network i.e. it’s plugged into one of the 3 ethernet ports on the powerline adaptor, with a switch (to which the Pi endpoint is connected) connected to one of the others.
This was nearly 9 days ago and I’ve not had any drops/stops either on local content or Tidal for that matter. The server hasn’t restarted thus far either. So it would seem that the problem may have been caused by connectivity issues between the endpoint downstairs and the core/router upstairs by virtue of the powerline.
Interestingly, since moving the core I’ve done an uncountable number of pings both from a laptop downstairs to the router upstairs and from a PC upstairs to the core downstairs. The latter has never given me anything other than 100% but on a handful of occasions, the Mac’s network utility has given me some dropped packets going to the router.