I have a 2013 Mac Pro with 1 TB SSD and 64 GB of RAM. It’s hardwired via ethernet to the switch, which is hard wired to the router. The wifi is also hardwired to the switch. (See my other post). I have everything sitting around my desk in my study, all close at hand. The only odd component is that I’m running ethernet over coax to the upstairs living room and that cable is what the miscue plays through when I am feeding my stereo. This was all running superbly until I converted to Mojave (which I had to do because I use my home machine for work, so I have to upgrade when our security folks tell me to).
I have in the past deleted the Roon Remote apps and reinstalled them. I will do that again tonight when I’m home from work.
The session with the Apple support engineer was crazy-making. I can get the Roon Remote app to connect to the Roon Core if I reboot the Mac Pro and in the process flush the P RAM. I have to use a specific sequence of steps to do this, which he walked me through (and I have now forgotten). Even then, it’s buggy. This does not establish a stable state of affairs. It goes bad rather quickly, and stops being connected after a few songs.
@Michael_Bade I may have skipped a few posts but you said you have an Airport express upstairs on the end of the MOCA connection? Is this also providing Wifi upstairs…and is your iPad connecting to that with it using a different wifi SSID and IP range? what happens if you turn off wifi on that APE?
Your Airport network should be set to bridge mode. for both the Extreme and Express
I’m in Bridge Mode for both WAPs. Both WAPs are on wired ethernet (downstairs standard cabling, upstairs MOCA), with different IP addresses at the router. They are also at extreme ends of the house and on different floors. In fact, I had to figure out a way to run cabling to the upstairs Airport Express because I couldn’t connect using a wifi link between WAPs alone. When we went to satellite TV and I don’t need the coax for the TV signal I bought MOCA adapters and reused the cabling. It ran perfectly until the Mojave upgrade.
Per your suggestion, I unplugged power to the upstairs WAP and tried to connect via Roon Remote to the Core wirelessly downstairs. I have Roon Core launched on the Mac Pro. The Roon Remote sees the Core on the Mac Pro (the correct IP address is visible on the “Choose Your Roon Core” screen) but there is a red dot and Connection Failed is listed. Every 30 seconds or so it tries to connect again, to no avail. When I press “Configure Roon OS devices on your network” the Remote searches for devices but nothing comes up.
I’m going to sign off now and reset the PRAM and see if I can replicate what I did with the Apple engineer a couple of months ago.
I’m back. I turned off my Mac Pro and restarted holding down Option-Command-P-R, flushing the PRAM. Once I was up I rebooted the Core, and once that was up I restarted the Remote. Viola! The remote connected to the Core. I could play music using the System Output from the Mac Pro. This is what I achieved with the Apple engineer.
I then went upstairs, and plugged the living room WAP back in. Once I had a green light on the WAP, I turned on the stereo and set it to accept the Ultra Rendu connection. I then changed the destination of the music stream from System Output to Ultra Rendu in the Remote. Boom - instantly, Connection Failed. I went back downstairs and tried to connect to the Core in the study, but Connection Failed there as well.
So, flushing the PRAM every time I boot the Mac Pro isn’t a solution. Is there something flawed about my Mac Pro? Could be - about half the time, when I boot the Mac Pro it doesn’t send a video signal to the monitor. I have to reboot during the middle of the boot-up process (by holding down the power button until it reboots) and always the second time around is the charm, and it boots. The Apple engineer I was dealing in February with didn’t think this was part of the issue, and I haven’t had time to pursue it further with Apple.
Just out of interest have you updated your Apple airports to the latest firmware? I thought I once read that Apple Airport Expresses we’re not recommended for use with Roon due to the sort of problems you are having.
It definitely sounds like there are issues with your Mac, is the firmware up too date? Just for the hell of it try an SMC reset as well (google SMC reset MacPro 2013), you never know (it sounds like you Mac could be having video card issues).
Thanks the the ideas, Mark - I have checked, and the SMC and Boot ROM firmware on the Mac Pro are both up to date. I have reset the SMC to no effect. And, the firmware on the Airports (both) is also up to date. I may re-install Mojave on my Mac Pro as a next step.
Thanks for the assessment - you may be right that I should get a device other than my Mac Pro to run Roon on. That is on my mind, too. It may well be that running Roon on a general-purpose machine is inherently suboptimal.
Maybe if you have the option to repartition the SSD to a 2nd smaller volume say 60GB and install a clean Mojave and Roon and restoration from a backup to the new install and see if this helps.
It sounds like there is something wrong with your Macbook Pro’s hardware if the video card is also having difficulties, other areas of the Macbook may not be performing as expected as well.
I had a similar thread where we performed extensive troubleshooting only to later find out that the hardware was causing strange issues in Roon:
My suggestion here is seeing if you can borrow another laptop from work or have a friend bring theirs over to your house. If things are stable in the same networking environment but with a different core, I believe the laptop may be at fault.
Michael, there is no way that you should have issues running Roon on a 2013 MacPro, my MacPro is a 2009 firmware hacked to a 2010 version. The only issues I encountered are when my Mac would come out of sleep, then sometimes it would lose endpoints but I have no issues with iOS remotes not connecting.
You could try creating a new user account on your Mac and starting Roon fresh on that user account, just as an experiment to see if your user account is corrupt and somehow causing issues.
I do now run ROCK on a fanless purpose built PC which is not supported (MOCK) as I wanted a low power silent core that would run 24/7. I would definitely recommend ROCK on a NUC but all the evidence for your issues point to a networking problem.
I really wish I could help you more, if you lived in Adelaide, South Australia I would offer to come around to help you.
Mark, Noris, and all who have contributed to helping me out - thanks very, very much for your help. I have a bunch of testing to do that will take a couple of weeks, given my schedule. I think I either have an OS install with issues, or hardware issues with my Mac Pro. First I’m going to install Roon on my laptop, also running Mojave, and see if it works, or if I replicate the issues. If it runs fine then I know the issue is localized to the Mac Pro or the networking, which is likely also a Mojave issue because everything ran swimmingly for a year with the same network setup until I upgraded the OS. Then I will reinstall Mojave on the Mac Pro and see if that takes care of things. if not, in to my local Apple repair shop goes the Mac Pro for testing. I’ll return to the thread when I have completed all this. Again, many thanks for your help!
Not yet, thanks for the suggestion. There is too much house (floors and walls) between the two WAPs for them to communicate wirelessly with each other, though. My former setup (when it was working) sent music to the stereo over ethernet. The wireless was for the Roon Remotes to take to the Core, and general wireless usage.
All who have helped me - I wasn’t able to find the flaw preventing communication between the Roon Core and Roon Remotes, so I took the step of investing in a music server - SonicOrbiter i7 from Small Green Computer (goes well with the UltraRendu I already had). Everything is now working perfectly. My music is on the new music server, and out iPads and phones work just fine as Roon Remotes. I need to figure out how to change licenses (stop the old one, which was on the annual plan, and go with the license that came with the SonicOrbiter). I’m posting this to close the loop. Thanks again for your help and suggestions.
Thanks for the update here and glad to hear that the SonicOrbiter i7 has resolved the issue!
As for the license question you have, our accounts team can follow up with you regarding this in a private message thread (which I will start shortly).