I just realised “we” are spending a lot of time enquiring support requests for setup details.
How about a small feature outlining a performance index and providing an automatic bandwidth test as well as Core & Endpoint types and communication media?
Not a trivial task, but VERY useful for both those in need of support and those providing?
The ultimate goal would be a chart similar to the ones seen in:
I thought this had been discussed years ago. Certainly a Roon centric Tidal/Qobuz bandwidth tester would be handy. Although, then you’d have a bunch of yahoos just banging away on the bandwidth test.
Hhmm I think the cast majority of network issues seen on the forum turn out to be down to internal networks, I think a streamer test would make things worse.
I wasn’t explicitly thinking of streaming services as such, but why not?
A Roon Core should perhaps be able to request a “ping” response from each of it’s configured audio endpoints and add that data to an automatic report. along with basic hardware info for the core and location of local media etc.
Of course this is expandable and suitable for meauring the time to request and play back a given audio track from Tidal/Qobuz as well as from local files, wherever they are located on the local network.
There is already a built-in test with RAAT. When it doesn’t work your test has failed! HA!
OK, real response now. A lot of people say “bandwidth” but on the various metrics that are involved with networks bandwidth is lower on the list. Why? Audio just doesn’t take-up that much bandwidth. Any modern ethernet or wifi network has plenty of bandwidth to support audio. The trick really is the ability to model latency (propagation delay between source and destination; in each direction), jitter (the variance in that propagation delay between adjacent packets), retries / retransmits at L2 (especially on wifi and some of these stats are completely hidden from the OS), and a whole host of other things that can make things go poof. A normal “ping” doesn’t occur anywhere near as quickly as the packets per second and response needed by RAAT to be considered “good”. So, yes, maybe a RAAT test where it sends data to an endpoint for X amount of time and verifies its getting acknowledgments back within a threshold would be good. But, honestly, that already happens when you hit play and Roon will stop playback when this goes out of that threshold.
I prefer Roon stay out of the networking business and focus on core functionality and usability. There are plenty of wifi analyzers and network troubleshooting apps available if you’re having playback issues. What I see a lot of times on this forum is “It only happens with Roon so it must be a Roon problem” instead of “Roon must be doing something different and my network is not optimized for that so let me go fix my network”. Maybe we just need a network troubleshooting guide that focuses on low bandwidth / high PPS + a crap-ton of multicast and what to do when that kind of traffic doesn’t work on your network?