Why is internet used so often whilst playing local albums?
Describe your network setup
Not applicable
This afternoon I got a lot of “Waiting for your Roon server’ messages’” whilst playing local albums/tracks. I had never experienced this kind of message before.
After some serious investigation, the cause of the problem was an ‘disturbed’ internet connection. It was working, but it had a lot of interruptions.
E.g. I could not run Speedtest Ookla completelely till the end of 1 run, it started , speed went up and down and somewhere half the proces, everything stopped.
So clearly something wrong at my ISP’s network.
In the meantime, problems seem to have been solved at my ISP’s side.
Now my question: Why is it there so frequent internet usage whilst playing local albums?
Music was playing fine by the way, but it is quite annoying getting this error message pushed on your remote display all the time.
The most likely scenario is that your local network was affected by the ISP outage, which meant device discovery failed. Waiting for your Roon Server simply means control and server cannot communicate.
The question I (try to) raise to support why my Roon server needs to check … with the Roon infrastructucture so frequently whilst playing local music.
It should play without internet, so i assume it will stop checking for some time if no internet is present.
But why does it need to check so frequently if internet is available (in my case yesterday bad internet, but that’s not what the issue here)
Thank you for your detailed explanation and for taking the time to investigate the issue.
To clarify, Roon does not rely on a constant internet connection to play local content. Playback of local files should work independently of your internet connection, as long as your local network remains stable.
However, in cases where your internet connection is disrupted in a specific way—for example, if your router is experiencing issues with DHCP, DNS, IGMP, or ARP resolution—then even local playback can be affected. This can happen particularly when the router is managed by the ISP, and the disruption affects how devices communicate on the local network, not just with the internet.
So while Roon itself is not dependent on the internet for local playback, a router misbehaving due to ISP-related problems could cause intermittent issues, including the “Waiting for your Roon server” message on remote devices. This typically occurs when remotes are unable to consistently discover or communicate with the Core.
If the problem has been resolved after your ISP fixed the issue, it’s likely that the router’s internal networking functions were impacted during the outage.
Please let us know if the problem returns or if you’d like help reviewing your network setup to ensure optimal performance in the future.
