Integrating Roon with Control4 made it unusable! Help!

We’re a Roon dealer with a retail location and a Custom Install division. For Roon, we’re using a Nucleus as the Core. We’re putting Control4 in our showroom, and have successfully integrated the Roon Core and Zone drivers in Control4. It works, but is mildly slow.

However, control via the Roon app is now terribly slow. We’re seeing delays of 10-15 seconds when starting to play a song. Some of the tracks (sometimes random but usually the same tracks) timeout and won’t play. The tracks that consistently won’t play are in albums that have other tracks that play. This happens with both Tidal and Qobuz, but sometimes a track that won’t play in one of them will play in the other. That said, when we unplug the Control4 controller (Core 3) the Roon app seems to come back to functioning like it did before Control4 was implemented. We’re starting to wonder if the querying frequency from the Control4 driver is bogging down the Nucleus, or if there is another issue.

We’ve reached out to Control4, but they weren’t able to help at all. Since neither the Core driver nor the Zone driver have a debugging setting, which would give us Lua output to try to find a pattern, we can’t even see what’s going on. Since the drivers were written by Roon (not written by Control4) and they are not Control4 certified, we can’t even have their engineering teams look into it.

Thinking the next step would be to capture network traffic and read the packets to look for a pattern, but that sounds time and resource-intensive. If we can avoid that it would be helpful.

That said, Roon has always been slow for us. We used to have a TP-Link network here (installed by another company before we acquired a Custom Install company) and on that it was terribly slow. Everything was slow. When we acquired the Custom Install company, they put in a full Araknis network including the router, level 4 managed switches, and access points. That single change literally doubled the speeds for everything in our retail space. Roon got better, but still remained slow. With the integration of Control4 it’s now gotten worse.

We have many customers that have Roon, and some of the employees as well, but none of theirs run this slow. We’ve tried replacing the Nucleus 3 times with units from our stock, and an additional 2 times before implementing Control4, but nothing has changed.

Has anyone seen any of these issues before?

Any suggestions of things to check/try?

Any ideas on how to get Lua output from the drivers in Control4?

Any help you guys can provide is much appreciated!!!

If you are a dealer, then I believe you should have a dealer email postbox that you can use to engage with Roon Labs directly. You might want to try that channel in addition to posting on the forum.

I did reach out to Roon directly but have heard nothing back thusfar.

As this is an integration with Control4, I was hoping maybe another integrator on the forums might have run across a similar situation or have some insight.

OK, it’s possible that network issues are causing the slow performance, since you say that Roon itself was slow before you added the Control4 integration.

Perhaps you can raise a support request, which would enable the support team to analyse the Nucleus logs to see if they can spot what’s causing the slow performance.

To equip the Roon Technical Support team to assist you directly, please follow this link to provide the details of your case to Technical Support: Technical Support Request

Respond to the prompts there to ensure that you’ve performed basic troubleshooting and to ensure Technical Support has the full details necessary to expedite Technical Support’s investigation into the case.

Your responses will create a ticket on Roon’s support tracking system and auto-generate a Community thread in the appropriate section.

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Thank you.

BTW - are you aware that there is currently an issue with the CDN of Qobuz? There’s a hotfix that has been released that will help, but Roon Labs are still working with Qobuz to find a permanent solution.

Roon 2.64 and ARC 1.75 are Live! - Roon Software Discussion / Software Release Notes - Roon Labs Community

I will submit a Technical Support Request following this reply.

I was now aware there was an issue with the CDN of Qobuz! That could be immensely helpful, but still wouldn’t completely explain the issues with Tidal so I’ll still need the technical support request.

I’ll check in with tech support and look into that hotfix in the meantime.

Thanks!!!