I have given myself a headache investigating this today, and I believe I have found both the problem and a solution.
The Problem:
Roon was stopping playback seemingly at random of tracks at 24/192, no others, and skipping ahead to the next song, which would play normally, and then repeat again on the next song.
After many long hours of watching Activity Monitor on the 2011 mini that runs my Roon Core, and witnessing this happen in real time, I believe I know the problem now. In the short window that Roon uses to download the songs, it spikes CPU usage to nearly 100%. If the OS decides to do something at the same time that takes a fair bit of CPU, Roon will “crash” and go to the next song. However, it seems to then get stuck in a high CPU usage mode and will not recover from this until the Roon Server is quit, and restarted. Once the Roon Server is quit and restarted it will play normally again until the above described conditions repeat.
Solution? The one I have been considering for a while now and that’s replace my 2011 mini with its slow as heck i5 dual core, its SSD Drive that I recently upgraded, and its 16GB of RAM with a dedicated Roon Appliance for my server such as the Sonic Transporter i9.
Interestingly, HQPlayer never used more than 11% of the processing in use whether or not the song was downloading or not, so that doesn’t seem to be the problem. Roon will use more processing power depending on the bit rate of the file being played, which I found odd, but ok, nothing I can do about that.