Inconsistently appearing roon remote phone audio device

Tinkering
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Roon Core Machine

  • ROCK running on a NUC7i5DNH1E

Networking Gear & Setup Details

  • gateway: pfsense, running on a 4-interface device
  • wan is on one interface
  • wired “normal” is on a second interface, with subnet 192.168.1.0/24 (desktop is here)
  • wireless is on a third interface, with subnet 192.168.2.0/24 (phone lives here)
  • roon is on the fourth interface (it’s the only thing), with subnet 192.68.3.0/24, and a static ip (.2)

nothing particularly funky firewall-wise – port for ARC punched through, subnets are allowed to talk to each other.

Connected Audio Devices

  • roon core is on the aforementioned NUC
  • desktop is win11, just acting as a zone
  • phone is Android (Pixel 7 Pro), running both ARC and Roon Remote

Number of Tracks in Library

~400 tracks (pretty small, all things considered)

Description of Issue

Roon Remote on my phone inconsistently fails to appear as an audio device (both under “select a zone” and under "settings → audio

Sometimes it just doesn’t show the phone itself as a playback option. Even restarting the app, clearing cache/storage, etc does not help. Even when the phone itself does not appear as an audio device, it can still control my desktop zone, browse the library, etc (that part is consistent)

When it works, there’s no noticeable lag in the phone appearing – sitting now at my desktop and closing an opening the app I can see the device appearing and disappearing as expected on my desktop.

For instance, I woke up this morning & it wasn’t appearing, I walked into the other room to start my day, did some stuff, then it appeared when i went to play some music. It worked before I took a nap, woke up to find it not working, did a buncha reading to try to figure things out and then it started working again, then stopped after i closed and re-opened it. It later started working again, and is working now.

It doesn’t seem like it’s a subnet issue, otherwise presumably my desktop would have the same issue, but the desktop seems to work fine (I can even see it disappear when my desktop sleeps, and then immediately reappear when it wakes up on my phone’s roon remote).

ARC playback continues to work consistently, even when the issue is occuring with Roon remote.

Do y’all have any tips on what network traffic to watch to debug this, or any ideas? the only thing i can think of off the top of my head seems like packet loss + udp issues, but that seems… questionable at best?

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@directxman12, welcome to the Community. Roon requires the Core and all Remotes and endpoints to be on the same subnet per its network requirements:

I can move your post to the Tinkering section if you would like other users to see if there are non-supported options for you. Is it possible to move all your Roon devices to the same subnet?

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yeah, moving to tinkering would be fine, thanks!.

redoing my network infra would be a bit of a pain, unfortunately (it’s this way somewhat intentionally for discoverability purposes and such), and i’d be surprised if it’s strictly a subnet issue considering it works ~50% of the time on my phone and 100% of the time on my other device (desktop, also on another subnet). One of the reasons i was confused, actually – folks’d said that separate subnets didn’t work without extra setup, but mine just did for my desktop w/o any extra fiddling.

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I recategorized it. Some other users have had success with crossing subnets or VLANs, maybe they will have some ideas for your configuration.

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It won’t work across subnets on a mobile device as endpoint . The remote part will work as it doesn’t rely on the same UDP broadcasts that RAAT zones do. The remote uses mDNS do discover the core which can traverse a subnet if configured on your router. I have a UniFi system and multiple vlans and all devices that rely on mDNS such as Airplay and chromecast clients that are on a different subnet will appear. RAAT zones will not. RAAT is like UPnP it uses similar broadcasts using UDP and possibly SSDP to discover endpoints and these unless configured won’t traverse easily.

As a remote I can use Roon on any subnet and it will work on an except as an audio zone until it’s on the same subnet.

But I have noticed like yourself that desktop pcs can often work and no idea why they do. My Mac work machine at home which is on my main subnet pops up especially when I am not using the VPN. As soon as that’s active it stops. But it will randomly disappear at times even when VPN isn’t running it isn’t stable.

Phones never exhibit this they just lose the zone straight away and it never returns until it back on the same subnet which is how I would expect it to behave.

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yeah, that mostly matches up with what i’m seeing, except that i get my phone to work sometimes, which is the weird part. i wonder if desktops are using a slightly different variation of the protocol or something.

i suspect my brain will refuse to let this go until i look at some pcap files, maybe i’ll see something there.

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Hi @directxman12

Whilst running VLANs is cool, for Roon it’s a recipe for trouble. Might be worth enabling WiFi on the VLAN/subnet your core is on and have one wireless Roon Remote device on that VLAN/subnet.

If you advise us on the make and models of your network equipment we might be able to make it work.

I’m not using my Unifi network equipment currently, but when I did and set up VLANs I needed to create firewall rules to allow what you have setup work.

If you are using 3 separate routers it could be a lot trickier to work around this.

:innocent:

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If you are using 3 separate routers it could be a lot trickier to work around this.

haha no, it’s not 3 separate routers, i don’t like pain & suffering that much :stuck_out_tongue:

it’s a single box with 4 nics on it, running pfsense, so theoretically it should be doable.

Might be worth enabling WiFi on the VLAN/subnet your core is on and have one wireless Roon Remote device on that VLAN/subnet.

oh, like turning on wifi on the core device so it sits on both subnets? or were you suggesting something else?

If you advise us on the make and models of your network equipment we might be able to make it work.

the gateway is a little 4-nic protectli box (this thing) running pfsense, hooked up to a unifi AP that shouldn’t be doing anything but being an AP on one nic, desktop on a second, and the roon on a third (that last part is mainly out of convenience, theoretically i could put the roon on an unmanaged switch with my desktop, but that wouldn’t solve the “wireless on different subnet” problem)

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Ah right I see why you might be experiencing an issue.

Your 4 port box with pfsense will by default (IIRC) have 3 subnets. If you were to bridge them you’d get one subnet and all your issues are likely to disappear.

However, it’s no optimal to do this with this tyoe of box.

I’d recommend a unmanaged switch from one port.

Pfsense > Switch > to everything = 1 subnet and usual no issues with Roon

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update: so having the ROCK just sit across subnets works fine, as suspected. i’ll probably poke around with the udp proxy and see if i can avoid needing that instead, but! i’d still love to know why it works sometimes without those fixes. That’s the baffling thing to me. ah well.

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Many things Roon does or doesn’t do are baffling. It’s idiosyncratic at the best of times.

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