Latest update made my life a little bit easier. I think I have biggest library in all of community and it was always a problem especially with ARC.
Now it works faster and even on iPhone ARC has enough memory to handle it.
But connection in last update is very unstable. Every few days I have to restart roon core in order to use ARC.
I think there is no other way as just relax and use what is it now. There is just no anything close on market.
Hello Sergei,
you are not the only one with this problem. I have 60.000 Albums (1.050.000 tracks) in my library and even with the new build ARC is not usable for me. It crashes during the first song I’m listening to.
Listening at home is working fine after I upgraded from a M1 16 GB Mini Mac to a 48 GB M4 pro Mini Mac and the new build made the listening experience even faster and better.
I feel your pain. I have a rather large library:
62,200 local album + 20,300 streamed albums = 82,500 albums
When I was using a powerful Windows PC as the Roon Server/Core things did not run all that great with lots of hiccups and frequent restarts. Pretty much a disaster.
About a year and half ago I switched the Roon Server to a dedicated unRaid server with plenty of memory and everything runs fine, not great but it works as it should. I restart Roon about once a week to help keep things running smoothly.
Basically the areas where things run slowly are those that require Roon to interface with the streaming services, such as showing an artist’s complete discography and, fairly often, starting playback of a streamed title. There is definitely a slowdown in the overall performance of Roon the larger one’s library gets.
Once playback has started there are no issues.
Wow, that is big. What I did is disconnected Qobuz and Tidal from roon and leave just local library which is about 17000 albums.
That was only way to keep ARC working. And I still can listen to Tidal/Qobuz via dedicated apps. Not perfect but…
Locally roon can handle it, but I wonder how long?
What server are you running Roon on?
I have about 50,000 albums and have had problems with ARC all along but it’s getting better and I’m learning to live with it though I don’t use it that much and only listen offline at a restaurant when waiting for guests or on short CarPlay drives. First, I keep about 30 Qobuz albums on the iPhone 17 Pro Max along with about 10 DSD albums of my own that are not available from Qobuz so if it crashes the reinstall takes about 30 minutes. Secondly, I go on line 2-3 times a week after ensuring that my Core on a Mac Studio is ready for ARC and I add an album or two of the albums in my library that I’ve tagged. Third, I place the phone in the refrigerator for about 15 minutes before this as in the past I have found that overheating causes crashes. But now that it’s working I find that the audio quality with an AK HC5 dongle is as good as on their SP-3000 with the same IEM’s that I listen on when taking the dog for long walks
I can relate to this thread completely, and my situation lines up almost exactly with what others are describing — and with what Roon themselves have acknowledged about ARC and large libraries.
My Roon Core runs on a Synology DS1821+ that I’ve upgraded quite heavily: a Ryzen‑based CPU, 64 GB of RAM, 2 TB of NVMe read‑cache, and a dedicated NVMe storage pool used exclusively for the Roon database. The system is extremely fast and stable. Roon Remote is instant, responsive, and never struggles. The server is absolutely not the bottleneck.
My library consists entirely of local files — around 48,000 albums, 587,000 tracks, 18,000 artists, and over 1,000 composers. It’s a huge library, but Roon Core handles it flawlessly.
On the client side, I’m using a Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra with 1 TB storage and 16 GB RAM, one of the most powerful phones available right now. Despite that, ARC has basically never worked well for me. On previous phones it sometimes wouldn’t even launch. On the S26 Ultra it at least starts, but the experience is still extremely poor: lag, freezes, slow searches, sync issues, and the phone heating up and burning through CPU and battery whenever ARC is running for more than a short moment.
After reading Roon’s own explanation that both iOS and Android enforce strict per‑app memory limits — and that around 250,000 tracks is already the practical upper limit even on the fastest phones — everything makes sense. ARC is simply trying to load and process more metadata than the mobile OS will allow. No amount of server power or phone hardware can compensate for that.
At this point, ARC just isn’t usable with a library of my size. Roon Remote works perfectly, but ARC is nowhere near stable or responsive in its current state, so I’m honestly considering uninstalling it until there’s a major update
Mac mini M1.
Thank you for that just about perfect summary of how Roon Remote and Roon Arc work with large music libraries. As you say, Roon Remote runs quite well but Arc remains problematic, to say the least.
I can Arc to run on my iPhone 16 and two FiiO digital audio players that I own. However using Arc with large music library is not for the faint of heart and getting Arc to run for the first time takes about around 30 minutes.
Regardless of the device I’m trying to use Arc on, if I don’t use Arc for several days, which is often the case, then I have to log out and back into my Roon server which effectively means that Arc is running for the first time. So if I want to use Arc then I have to wait at least 30 minutes for it start, each and every time. Kind of a BIG deal breaker.
After each Roon update I give Arc another try in the hope that this time will be different and that perhaps Team Roon finally fixed Arc. Nope, never gonna happen.
On one side I can relax a little - it’s good to know that there are people have much bigger library, so I have room to grow.
On other side, it’s not bad idea to look for phone that has more memory which is more critical in this case then CPU power. Maybe even not a phone, I think to try with Retro Pocked game console. Not that I expect something bus still.
BTW I have player Astel&Kern SE300 - great in everything but ARC just can not even to start properly.
I’m listening ARC every day for at least 4-5 hours. For me it’s necessary part of my life. 
I really want it to work properly.
Your experience is why I only use ARC for offline listening to a few albums on short car trips and waiting for friends in restaurants
I find Arc very problematic even in offline mode, I guess it still have to much idexed up and it’s still sluggish.
Just opened it to check, U was in offline mode, from start, teied to naviate around, like 30 seconds later it crashed.
Also it suck’s that all this high quality lossless music is embed in the [ARC] app and can’t be used by other apps, so at the moment I’m wasting over 100 GB of internal space of my Samsung galaxy S26 Ultra 1 TB total space.
That’s a shame!
Why?!
I’ve had these issues for a long time and here are a few tricks that have helped me more recently I have 17000 albums in my library and Roon barely handles it :) - #7 by Norman_Spector
two things that have helped with this – 1 check that your server is a available to ARC before you go online. 2. Put your phone in the refrigerator for 10-15 minutes before going on line 3. Go online to download albums incrementally [tag them first] and don’t navigate around too much
My Library is not even close as large than yours, but I can agree with your findings.
What I could not ready in any post here so far, that the connection from CORE to ARC is related on your Upload Speed. ARC need to synchronise, as far as I understood, so with such large amounts of tracks, Even with a very highspeed upload connection, it would take a lot of time.
And the limitation of smart phones storage, and their connection to the provider has also certain bandwidth limits.
So even with my small library of 130000 tracks, it takes a very long time to be ready. Major issue is, that it takes long until the connection is established. I wish to have a Fibre Uplink at home, to test, where the real bottleneck is.
My PC is also the CORE, and my music is on my Syno 1821+, both with a 10 GB/s LAN.
I don’t use ARC due to these issues, and if, its only to check what music I was listening to, when I’m in the record store to find it on vinyl.
Shouldn’t the title read ARC barely handles it ??
Am I glad I bought that 1 Tb SD card and that (these days) my phone supports SD
I decided I could manage without all 37 versions of Beethoven’s sonatas 24/7 , 3 is enough
I don’t use ARC and frankly can’t see a use for it (for me). It seems to displease more than please from all the comments
