Core Machine
Late 2014 Mac mini 2.6Ghz. CPU - 8G RAM - 2TB SSD with music library on SSD
Apple OS Big Sur 11.3.1 - Roon 1.8 (build 795)
My copy of Roon is running on an Apple Mac Mini - macOS Big Sur 11.4 - This is not a multi-purpose machine. It runs ONLY Roon. This computer normally runs “headless” (no keyboard or mouse attached, and the monitor turned off). There is no anti-virus software on the machine. The USB output of the Mac mini is connected directly to the Emotiva Big Ego+ DAC.
Roon Remote, running on an iPad mini serves as the control device for the Roonisphere.
Network Details
Since Roon operates without need for the internet, the connections are available, but not normally active. A Netgear Orbi cable-modem / Router / Wi-Fi hub is connected to the Mac mini by Ethernet. Wi-Fi signals must travel from the iPad to the Orbi (at the other end of the house) and back to the Mac mini (via Ethernet) for communication to take place.
The Mini is connected to the house system by Ethernet, but doesn’t normally use the connection. The router the Ethernet connects to also has the wi-fi base station.
Audio Devices
Emotiva Big Ego+ USB DAC that feeds analog audio devices, including (variously and individually) a Black Ice Audio F22 tube integrated amp, a Crown PSA-2 power amplifier, a Audio-gd HE-1 preamplifier, an Ashly power amplifier, and my pair of modified Heathkit 12 watt tube power amplifiers.
Library Size
This library is just under 1TB.
Description of Issue
The problems I’ve having with Roon are:
Occasionally (maybe once every two hours of music playtime) Roon (or, maybe Roon Remote) will crash completely and dump me out to the iPad screen. Roon will not auto-restart, but I can manually restart it and 50% of the time, it will restart to the track, album, or screen where it was when it crashed. The rest of the time, Roon reverts to the top of the track or album list it was in when it crashed. The music is not interrupted by the crash, and any selections in the queue are still there.
Roon will occasionally disassociate albums that I’d combined. For example, if I have a two-album set, I’ll often combine both discs into a single album to prevent the album cover from appearing twice. Roon sometimes takes umbrage at this and sorts them back into two different albums.
Roon will (fairly often) throw out the cover art that I’ve manually associated with an album and substitute a completely wrong cover instead. And when I say “wrong,” I mean it! Different artist name, different album title, and different genre of music. This happens with high frequency.
On some few albums, Roon will “roughen” or distort the music. I’m not totally convinced that this isn’t just a bad rip on my part, though, so I’m not yet ready to foist the blame on Roon yet. It sounds like a somewhat distorted midrange. This is not caused by the speakers or the room, because the vast majority of my library doesn’t sound that way.
“Roon Radio” won’t turn off. I don’t want Roon to start new songs for me, but no matter how many times I change this preference, within a few days, the Roon Radio feature becomes active again.
There seems to be a number of issues with certain problems like this on iOS remotes. It’s being looked into. There is a thread that asks for for feedback on this so they can help pinpoint what is actually causing it
When you say combined them, have you used Roon to do this or you have just combined the directory structure ? Do you alteri their metadata to indicate it’s a multidisc set? If it’s classical thennmore often than not you will need to edit them together in Roon due to lack of decent metadata in its service providers. Did you try and use it’s matching tools to identify it as a two disc set You can still edit the albums in question in Roon and group them as one album. I would check out the Roon Knowledge base if you have not all ready.
Have you told Roon to use the local artwork, has the album been correctly identified by Roon. You can tell Roon to use local or its metadata for artwork or upload your own. Again I would read up on the knowledge base on this.
Try these albums using other software to see if this goes away at all or is still present. Will help see if it Is Room or a bad rip.
Roon radio is turned off in the play queue for each endpoint used it’s not a global feature. So if you have multiple zones and are moving play queue to different zones if one has Radio on it will set it to be on again.
First, thanks for your reply. To answer your questions:
Glad to know that Roon is looking at the iOS interface. It’s usable, but slightly flaky.
I do all file manipulation of music in Roon. I may or may not have flagged the albums as being a multi-disc set; I’ll check that. Much of my library IS classical music. The matching tools won’t help me because many of the original files weren’t multi-disc. Where does one access the Roon knowledge base?
I have told Roon to use the local artwork, but in many cases, while Roon displays my local artwork for a certain varying time period (days, weeks, etc.) it often reverts to either a previous cover or to something totally off the wall. At one time, almost a third of my library (anything remotely jazz) had been flagged by Roon as the same Dave Brubeck album cover!
This is a good suggestion. Now that I think of it, though, some of the same tracks that are currently sounding distorted sounded that way also with jRiver. So that pretty much flags the source file rather than the playback software. Bad rips! What do you recommend for ripping software?
I have but one zone. Nothing fancy about my Roon system. I’ve switched the Roon Radio switch off multiple times, but a week later, it’s active again (and the switch is in the active position). I didn’t change it, and the only other person who could (my wife) doesn’t even access the music server computer at all. This one’s a mystery…
You don’t need the server to change radio settings it’s done via any remote on the play queue for that zone. I turn it off regularly and it works fine until I switch it back on or I move a queue from another zone where it’s active. Never once had it turn on itself
Boxsets and classical are a known issue with Roon and most software in general. If Roons metadata providers don’t have it then you have to make it yourself within the constraints Roon gives you. There are lots of good helpful threads about boxset handling and how others do it. I am not a big classical listener so can’t advise here. All my multidiscs work fine. I make sure rips are tagged accordingly and then put them in a structure Roon likes and they work fine. Never had issues with artwork reverting so that’s an odd one.
Thanks so much for taking the time to discuss these matters on community. It is clear they stem from your interest in using Roon and the desire to organize and explore your music library . Thanks for telling us about it too.
It looks like some of the questions were already beautifully answered, however, others are still an issue. If I’m not mistaken, this is where we are:
iOS crash. We’re collecting information on the form that you can find on this thread:
You can find the help center here, as @CrystalGipsy has pointed out. A couple articles that may prove relevant for your use case are these:
Sorry about this . A great starting point would be an exact example. Can you think of one? What is the artist, what is the file you’ve used, what it reverted to.
Here is a conversation that might give you a few ideas of ripping software used with success by our subscribers:
I have to agree with the mystery part of this . Wow! Can you think of a power outage or any event that might have happened that could have altered this? Could you keep an eye on it please
. Thanks for telling us about it too.
. A great starting point would be an exact example. Can you think of one? What is the artist, what is the file you’ve used, what it reverted to.
. Wow! Can you think of a power outage or any event that might have happened that could have altered this? Could you keep an eye on it please 
