Intermittent Disappearance of Airplay Devices on Mac Studio M2 (ref#54VJ4S)

Support
1

Hi! What’s not quite right with Roon?

· None of the above quite fits

None of the above quite fits

· None of these quite match

Tell us what's going on

· roon is running permanently on a Mac Studio M2. I have several Airplay audio-devices connected, as well as iPhone and iPad. Unfortunately these devices disappear regularely from the list of audio devices. The only solution is to shut down the roon server and start it again. This is not really comfortable, esp. when you are not near the computer. Do you have any idea how to solve this problem ?

Tell us about your home network

· router: fritzbox 7590, gigabit ethernet and switch,

2

Hello @Paul_Mager,

Welcome to the forum, and thanks for letting us know. Can you please note the exact local time + date when these devices disappear and the exact local time + date when you restart Roon Server to get them to reappear? We’ll enable diagnostics for your account to see if we can gather more details. Does this issue happen with a few specific AirPlay devices and the issue doesn’t occur for some of your other AirPlay devices?

3

Hi,

I cannot say when the disappearence of the audio devices happens. The Mac is running all the time, besides roon there is a homeassistant server runnig in a vm. But I am not listening to music via roon all the time. I recognize it 1-2 times during the day and also often in the morning.

my main airplay devices are: 2 homepod mini, 2 Belkin airplay adapter, iPad, iPhone, 2 Yamaha streaming speakers. They all dissappear when it happens.

4

Hey @Paul_Mager,

Thanks for the description. We were able to pull fresh Roon Server logs, which gave a clearer picture into what might be happening.

Your AirPlay devices aren’t crashing; Roon is intentionally removing them. Roon keeps a device in the audio list only as long as it keeps hearing that device announce itself on the network (via mDNS/Bonjour multicast). When about 3 minutes pass with no announcement, Roon “expires” the device and it disappears. Normally it comes back on the next announcement, the fact that yours only return after a Roon Server restart tells us the discovery is getting stuck until the server re-initializes. That matches your experience perfectly.

The logs point to two things on the network side:

First, your FritzBox is handing Roon the wrong address for several speakers, it’s advertising a number of them (a HomePod, the Apple TVs, the Yamahas, the Belkin adapter, and others) at 192.168.178.1, which is the FritzBox itself rather than the speaker. Roon then tries to reach the speaker at the router’s address and the connection is refused.

Second, and most important: your Mac Studio is showing up on the network at several different IP addresses at once. This is almost always caused by an extra virtual network adapter, in your case, very likely the Home Assistant VM. When the Mac has more than one network interface, Roon’s device-discovery can bind to the wrong one or stop receiving the multicast announcements altogether, which is the classic cause of “everything disappears until I restart.”

A couple of things worth trying, in order:

  1. In the Home Assistant VM's network settings, change the adapter from "Bridged" to "NAT" (or otherwise make sure the VM isn't giving your Mac a second address on the same 192.168.178.x network). The goal is for the Mac Studio to have just one LAN IP. This is the single most likely fix.
  2. On the FritzBox, keep all your audio devices on one flat network (no guest network or separate SSID for the speakers), and assign fixed IP addresses to your HomePods, Belkin adapters and Yamahas so they stop changing. Also make sure you're on the latest FritzOS, as newer versions handle AirPlay/multicast better. If you're running any kind of mDNS repeater or reflector on the network, disable it, that's a likely source of the wrong-address entries above.
If it's helpful, we noticed the disappearances cluster overnight, so by morning many devices are already gone, which lines up with you noticing it most in the mornings.

Please give the VM adapter change a try first and let us know how it goes. If the devices still drop after that, we can dig further. :+1: