Hi, reviving this thread as it seemed to best fit my frustrating situation. Some days there are no problems and some with the odd hiccup, but others, like today, Roon on my Macbook Pro wouldn’t play anything from Tidal without pausing within seconds of starting and then moving on to the next track, with the “Tidal media loading slowly message” popping up each time.
My setup:
Core: running a Roon ROCK on a NUC that is wired to an eero router that has a lightning fast fibre optic internet connection. I use wifi to distribute music to the roon endpoints, but all endpoints are wired to an eero device that is part of the mesh network.
The issue is not exclusive to the Macbook, but it is a rare occurrence for the other endpoints (using raspberry pis to feed a Mytek Brooklyn Bridge (USB) and an Anthem receiver (coax)). The Macbook Pro is a late 2013 model with 16GB RAM running Catalina and has an iFi DSD nano BL usb DAC/headphone amp attached. The issue would occur regardless of what upsampling or other DSP was activated.
I used exclusive mode for Roon on the Macbook until reading this thread. I just turned it off and tried Tidal again. All the tracks that regularly failed only minutes ago are playing flawlessly now. Go figure.
If Exclusive Mode was causing issues, it is likely that there was another application on the Mac that was trying to also have exclusive control of the endpoint. Is anything besides Roon running on the Mac?
Have things remained working when not using exclusive mode?
Thanks. No further issues today after turning off Exclusive Mode. There are other audio devices seen by the Mac (e.g., internal speakers, monitor speakers, etc.) and I select one of those devices for all non-Roon computer audio functions.
I spoke too soon. First, I noticed that after turning off Exclusive mode, the feed was no longer showing as bit-perfect. I can’t recall, but that might have been the reason I originally turned on Exclusive mode in the first place. And then, after a couple of hours with no problems, the stuttering came back, but seemingly only on non-MQA files. And playback would quit on non-MQA files at the same place each time the same track was attempted.
So I just turned Exclusive mode back on with full DSP (upsampling, DSD conversion, headphone curve) and for some reason tracks that would choke all afternoon are now playing back with no problem. Such a track, 7:50 long, just played all the way through without issue. I think I need to experiment with other DACs to see if the behaviour is unique to the IFI iDSD nano.