· Something else
· I am experiencing freezes or crashes
Roon regularly but intermittently freezes or delays playing the next song in the playlist on shuffle play. I have Qobuz linked with Roon playlist. Control4 is the system controller. I play Roon through a USB DAC.
Control4 system controller to Roon Nucleus+ with 4TB onboard storage, Roon to USB DAC to McIntosh pre-pro...
Hello @Jonathan_Winer ,
Thanks for reaching out. I’ve activated diagnostics mode for your account and I am looking over the error logging. I see that you are having a few network-related errors. Can you please describe your network setup, including the model/manufacturer of all your networking gear? Does the issue happen on multiple zones?
Hi Noris, thank you for your response. My network audio signal path is Xfinity CM hard-wired into Pakedge MS-2416 switch to Roon Nucleus+ to iFi Zen Dac V2 to McIntosh MX-123 pre-pro to McIntosh MC-257 to Legacy Signature SE speakers. The Roon app is active on iPhone, iPad and Mac Studio using wi-fi signal from Xfinity modem and two EERO Pro 6 wi-fi mesh boosters. I usually access Roon through Control4, which controls my entire system, but when Roon fails, accessing it through the Roon app yields the same result. I have tried fixing this problem many times, resetting devices, Roon app, qobuz app, Control4, wi-fi modem, etc. I’ve isolated the problem to Roon. The Roon app simply freezes (or stalls between songs), no matter which device I use to access it. The problem occurs across all zones. I have songs stored on the Roon Nucleus 4TB hard drive that came with the unit, and also access songs from Roon website. I have Roon playlists with 5k songs and play in shuffle mode.
The network failures you are seeing are likely power failures (they occur fairly often, but I have a stand-by generator that restores power in 20 seconds). When the power fails, it takes about 5 minutes for the Xfinity modem to reset. Roon often fails for hours at a time, and eventually recovers on its own, usually overnight.
On the bright side, Roon has been working well over the past few weeks. I did recently use the new “Improve” feature to clean up duplicate songs and instruct Roon on which versions to select. The Roon intermittent failure problem has been occuring since it was installed. Could it be over-heating? Can you tell from your end?
Hey @Jonathan_Winer,
Thanks for the additional info!
Do you have any sort of UPS or protection to your devices / Nucleus? If not, it’d be a worthy investment, as power failure can lead to hardware failure and potential database corruption.
Review another fresh diagnostic report from your Roon Server, I’m seeing a fair amount of playback errors occurring due to poor network bandwidth, for example:
Trace: [iFi (by AMR) HD USB Audio] [raatclient] GOT [732] {"samples":24000,"status":"Dropout"}
Trace: [iFi (by AMR) HD USB Audio] [raatclient] GOT [732] {"samples":24000,"status":"Dropout"}
Trace: [iFi (by AMR) HD USB Audio] [raatclient] GOT [732] {"samples":24000,"status":"Dropout"}
Warn: [Media Room USB] [zoneplayer/raat] Too many dropouts (>3s dropped out in the last 30s). Killing stream
Could you temporarily setup a direct ethernet connection from your Nucleus to your primary router, and see if things stabilize at all for you?
We’ll be on standby for your results. Thank you! 
Thank you Benjamin, for your response, and for looking at the history. Yes, I have a whole-house surge protector which was installed by the power company, Duke Energy, four years ago. In addition, the Nucleus is plugged into a Wattbox WB-300VB-IP-5 power conditioner with surge protection.
Re: the ethernet connection-- I am for some reason unable to wire the Nucleus directly to the modem without bringing down the entire network. As soon as I disconnect the Xfinity modem from the EERO Pro 6, the network crashes. The system was professionally installed and I’m not sure why this is happening, but I don’t want to mess anything up by fiddling around too much. (Btw, slight correction in my description of the signal routing-- the Xfinity modem is wired to the EERO mesh router, which is wired to the Pakedge switch.) In any event, no other devices in my home are losing network connection regularly.
I do not recall many times when my internet has been down over the past couple of years. Maybe once or twice. Roon has crashed or slowed down significantly on at least 100 occasions over this same period. HOWEVER, as I mentioned, I do have a lot of power failures and whenever the power fails, for even a second, it takes the Xfinity modem 5 or 6 minutes to reboot. That is undoubtedly what you are seeing in your diagnostics report which shows “>3s dropped out in the last 30s.”
Can you tell whether the Nucleus is operating from WiFi, or ethernet cable? The Nucleus is in the same cabinet as the Xfinity and the EERO, about 18" away. I’d have to think the WiFi signal is exceptionally strong in that location.
We could try reconfiguring the Nucleus to operate from my WiFi network, instead of a hard-wired setup, but in all honesty, I think there is a low probability that this situation is caused by network failures. No other device in my home theater system, or anywhere else in my home, has problems that resemble this in any way. It is very unlikely that the Pakedge switch would cause Roon to stop working for several hours and then recover on its own, and on other days slow down with delays of 30-60 seconds between songs, and on other days skip songs and cut out in the middle of songs. But, I am willing to try other things, if you feel it is necessary, to get this problem resolved once and for all.
Do you think the Nucleus could be over-heating? Would this show up in your diagnostics report?
Benjamin, from what you have seen in diagnostics, do these failures appear to be the result of a software issue, or hardware?
Here are some of the glitches from the past week:
8/15/2024 Roon quit in the middle of three different songs and then skipped to the next song in the shuffle play queue. Played 50% of 2000 Light Years, skipped One of These Nights and played 20% of Learning to Fly.
8/19/2024 Roon shuffle queue songs are the same as the day before…
8/20/2024 The red exclamation mark (error symbol) remains lit at all times, showing “Metadata Improver Paused.” I checked to verify that I have the latest version of Roon, which I always do, and the internet connection is fine.
Hi @Jonathan_Winer,
Let’s start with the basics
From my understanding, this is how your home network is set up relative to your Nucleus. Let’s ignore any endpoints for now, and focus on the Nucleus’s pathway to the internet.
Xfinity modem → Eero Pro 6 → Packedge switch → Nucleus
So, the Nucleus is behind what appears to be a layer-3 managed switch.
A layer-3 managed switch like this one can effectively do just that, since it has granular control over packet routing at the device level. If misconfigured, this switch can misroute requests to/from the Nucleus and upstream servers. We want to conduct a basic comparison test with the switch removed from the Nucleus’s pathway to the internet.
Use an ethernet port on the Eero router to directly connect the Nucleus. Please let us know once you’ve had a chance to try this test.
Okay, I connected Roon directly to the EERO router as you suggested. Here is what happened after I made the direct ethernet cable connection from EERO to Roon: The past 4 days with Roon have been pretty typical, although there were no long (several hours) freezes. I listened to Roon between 3 and 6 hours each day. As you can see, I logged 15 separate failures ranging from 1 or 2-minute lags between songs to total shutdown of Roon. I’m going to have to reconnect the Pakedge switch asap, because the Pakedge must be connected to the router in order for other parts of my home theater system to function. But, before I do, can we agree that the Pakedge is not the source of the trouble? If you’d like to make some tests remotely, please let me know.
Here is the log:
FAILURE LOG SINCE DIRECT INTERNET CONNECTION
8/24 2 min lag at 5:55 pm after Sugar Magnolia
8/24 6:51 Joe Walsh intro plays in shuffle play for the third time this week, in 5000-song playlist.
8/24 long lag at 7:20 p.m.
8/25 2 min. lag at 2:44 pm before Introspection
8/26 2 min lag at 9:30 am after Shimmer
8/26 1 min lag @ 10:01 am
8/26 2 min lag @ 10:30 am before You Can Close Your Eyes
8/26 1 min. lag @10:35 am after You Can Close Your Eyes
8/26 1 min lag @ 10:41 am after You’re a Better Man than I, then false start of a few seconds on unknown song, then long lag before Further on Up the Road
8/26 1 min lag @10:55 am after Sugar Daddy
8/26 1 min lag @10:58 am after All Shook Up
8/26 Error Message “Can’t Connect to Roon Search” @10:59 am and 11:02 am and 11:10 am
8/26 1 min lag @11:57 after Parsley, Sage…
8/27 15 min. freeze around 2 pm (approx)
8/27 Roon simply quit at around 3:15 pm “Unexpected error loading album. Try again later. (Unauthorized)”
8-27 5:00 pm Error mesage “Metadata Improver Paused… Ronn is having trouble verifying your connection with our servers… check internet connection [it’s fine, Roon is streamig now]… make sure you’re runnning the latest version of Roon” (HOW DO I CHECK THAT?)
Hi @Jonathan_Winer,
Thanks for your time and effort so far 
I wish we could, and that it could be that simple, but after another review of a fresh diagnostic report from your Nucleus, we’re still seeing frequent network-related errors in combination with repeated failures in loading and buffering tracks. Here are a few examples:
Warn: [broker/accounts] failed to refresh account info: Result[Status=NetworkError]
Warn: [broker/accounts] failed to update machine allocation: Result[Status=NetworkError]
---> System.Net.Sockets.SocketException (101): Network is unreachable
Warn: [qobuz/media] could not get playback info for 202:0:168871673: Result[Status=NotAvailable, ErrorText=No streaming URL returned]
Trace: [Media Room USB] [zoneplayer/raat] too many dropouts. stopping stream
Are you able to allocate bandwidth priority to the Nucleus via your router settings? Perhaps safely rebooting your router after directly connecting would be a good test as well.
Are these tracks all from Qobuz? Are they all added to your library within Roon? Do you experience these issues outside of large, multi-thousand-track playlists?
And my apologies if I’ve glazed over this - if you play the same playlist from the Qobuz web player or direct app, do you run into any issues?
We’ll be on standby for your results
Benjamin, thank you for your response. I’ve contacted Eero for assistance, through their “help” page, but have no idea if I’ll get a response. Eero was in fact “reset” during a 20-second power failure that occurred on 8/26 around 2 pm. Xfinity modem was likewise reset. Note Roon errors both before and after this reset.
I sent you a list of 16 incidents over a 4-day period, with times and descriptions. Did you check all 16, to see if there were network errors on your diagnostics report on all 16 occasions?
I’m not sure I understand why we cannot agree that Pakedge is not the problem, since problems have persisted after Pakedge was completely eliminated from the network.
All 5k songs on the playlist I’ve been using were added using Roon, not the Qobuz app, but many are on Roon via Qobuz. I did not use Qobuz directly to create or add to the playlist.
Is Roon able to manage a 5k playlist in shuffle mode, or could that be the cause of the failures? I notice that Roon does not seem to use the entire 5k set of songs when it creates a queue. It appears to me that Roon looks at a small subset of the songs to create a queue of x number of songs, and then perhaps later repeats that process as more songs are added to the queue. Is that more or less correct? Could this be causing stalls? Should I be somehow refreshing or reshuffling the queue periodically?
My hope is to obtain a randomly sequenced selection of tracks in the shuffle queue, but I suspect AI is at work, creating a playlist based on my perceived taste, and playing songs that are perhaps related in some way to contiguous tracks. Or is the shuffle queue sequence in fact random?
I did not pay attention to adding the tracks to my library when I added them to my playlist. I simply did a Roon search, found the songs and then added them to the playlist. Some are in my library, but I don’t think they all are. Is that important?
I look forward to your reply.
Regards,
Jon Winer
Hey @Jonathan_Winer,
Thanks for the detailed follow up!
We checked numerous timestamps and observed the same pattern across each occurrence. There are repeating FTMSI-B timeouts with Qobuz, causing the file not to download in time for playback.
Your Roon Server likely had a good upstream connection initially but then lost it or it got throttled. Bandwidth regulation could be one thing, as well as interference from other devices in the network.
Yes, 5000 tracks is the max limit for shuffle, see more about that here.
My apologies here as I failed to recall this - if the device was removed from the chain and issues persisted, we can rule it out.
However, we’re still seeing bandwidth limits being set, likely causing these issues. For example:
Trace: FTMSI-B 4 FileCache qo/A9FCD957 dwStatus:AllBlocksDownloaded files:0 accessTimeOut:True priorities: ('zoneplayer:8':485) --> bw limit:0kbps
Debug: FTMSI-B-OE qo/4A9B864E exit thread signalled
Info: FTMSI-B FileCache disposed qo/4A9B864E
Warn: [easyhttp] [11778] GET https://streaming-qobuz-std.akamaized.net/file?uid=2024821&eid=118897306&fmt=27&profile=1725397972 web exception without response: socketmsg (ConnectionRefused): Connection refused
Warn: FTMSI-B-OE qo/D55E9572 rid:1 error response: 999
Were you able to review any options to allocate additional network priority to the Nucleus from your router settings?
Eero techs tell me that Eero does not have the capability to allocate bandwidth to any specific device. In all honesty, that seems like an unusual request. The Eero was, for over a week, sending signal straight into Roon via a wire. This still did not resolve the problem. I will say that over the past two days, there were only two incidents-- last night and early this afternoon. Roon is one of the few devices in the household that uses a lot of bandwidth. I live alone and there is no video gaming or anything similar going on while I listen to music (or ever). Meanwhile, I have been checking every device in my home, to see if it is running the latest firmware. The xfinity modem, eero router, Pakedge switch, MX123 pre/pro and Roon device are all updated. I’m not sure what else to do.
Hey @Jonathan_Winer,
Outside of further investigating ways to increase bandwidth to your Roon Server, we could take another look at a fresh diagnostic report when the issue occurs again, but it will likely show similar traces we’ve seen prior.
Let us know the name of the track the next time it happens.
Benjamin, Last night I recall a long delay at Elvis, Kentucky Rain, around 10:30 pm.
Questions: Can you please translate this error message (below) into English, without codes or tech terms? I’d like to be sure I understand it, so I can tell Eero exactly what Roon is seeing that is causing Roon to fail. Is it slow internet speed? Loss of signal? Or insufficient bandwidth? Is Qobuz always involved in the glitches? Are Roon and Qobuz communicating with one another correctly? Is the Nucleus working correctly? Is Control4 implicated in the lags? Sorry to have so may questions, but I’d like to determine if Eero or possibly the Xfinity modem, or the internet signal itself are involved.
Storage Questions: I see references to “FileCache” in the error message. Is it working correctly? I assume that the File Cache is inside my 4TB Roon Nucleus. Are my playlist songs stored in the Nucleus? Since I made my playlists more than 6 months ago, should or could the songs in my playlists be readily available from the Nucleus, rather than streaming every song from the internet every time I play it? Is this something that Roon’s new Titan can do?
Hello @Jonathan_Winer ,
The below error says that Qobuz couldn’t download the next chunk in time to stream the track because the bandwidth dropped to 0 and then Roon received a 999 error, which is fairly generic but it indicates network issues. Looking over your logs further, this error occurs right after a poor connection message, meaning that Roon has insufficient download bandwidth speed from Qobuz servers for the track. Here you can see what the most recent errors look like in your logs:
Line 1751: 09/10 23:22:49 Warn: FTMSI-B-OE qo/105B9E1C: poor connection kbps:1828.0 (min:3509.0)
Line 4553: 09/10 23:28:25 Warn: FTMSI-B-OE qo/BB178901: poor connection kbps:958.0 (min:7116.0)
Line 5214: 09/10 23:42:33 Warn: FTMSI-B-OE qo/EA2D8CC9: poor connection kbps:1071.0 (min:3562.0)
Line 5510: 09/10 23:50:17 Warn: FTMSI-B-OE qo/414239C2: poor connection kbps:1924.0 (min:3863.0)
Line 9253: 09/11 00:02:39 Warn: FTMSI-B-OE qo/EF6E46E3: poor connection kbps:817.0 (min:1144.0)
Line 9435: 09/11 00:08:17 Warn: FTMSI-B-OE qo/06C50211: poor connection kbps:795.0 (min:1112.0)
Line 9730: 09/11 00:17:13 Warn: FTMSI-B-OE qo/E2ECD81B: poor connection kbps:962.0 (min:2726.0)
Line 9991: 09/11 00:23:20 Warn: FTMSI-B-OE qo/98D7EA82: poor connection kbps:3084.0 (min:5667.0)
Line 10198: 09/11 00:26:17 Warn: FTMSI-B-OE qo/B39EECB2: poor connection kbps:2098.0 (min:3588.0)
Line 10445: 09/11 00:31:21 Warn: FTMSI-B-OE qo/CC0E9DB1: poor connection kbps:719.0 (min:1080.0)
Line 10690: 09/11 00:36:12 Warn: FTMSI-B-OE qo/C994ABE7: poor connection kbps:901.0 (min:5949.0)
Line 10923: 09/11 00:40:46 Warn: FTMSI-B-OE qo/ABD323CA: poor connection kbps:3121.0 (min:5782.0)
Line 11052: 09/11 00:43:36 Warn: FTMSI-B-OE qo/C1F2BD3B: poor connection kbps:1028.0 (min:8221.0)
Line 11793: 09/11 00:52:51 Warn: FTMSI-B-OE qo/0C502E35: poor connection kbps:836.0 (min:3803.0)
Line 12904: 09/11 02:09:50 Warn: FTMSI-B-OE qo/EF8CC111: poor connection kbps:1610.0 (min:8215.0)
Line 13420: 09/11 02:28:30 Warn: FTMSI-B-OE qo/17F89239: poor connection kbps:1984.0 (min:5309.0)
Line 13651: 09/11 02:32:19 Warn: FTMSI-B-OE qo/C2FB98D6: poor connection kbps:1007.0 (min:3357.0)
We have seen users have a better experience in the past if they change their Router’s DNS servers from the ISP provided ones to Cloudflare DNS, Quad9 or Google DNS. Can you please give this a try and let me know if it helps?
One other option here would also be to navigate to Roon Settings → Services → Qobuz and lower the streaming quality. If it works fine with a lower quality, then the network speed is insufficient to stream the higher quality tracks.
Thank you Noris. I am reaching out to Eero, for assistance changing the DNS server, as you suggested, and also to verify that the ethernet cable connection between the modem and router base station is active. I can also report that there have been fewer delays between songs, since I updated the firmware in all devices.
I have a question about internet speed. When I do an online “speed test” the download speed score is usually higher than 800 Mbps, but I notice that the speed is fluctuating from second to second, rather than steadily flowing. Is this a potential issue?
Hey @Jonathan_Winer,
That sounds like expected behavior, I don’t think there’s anything to worry about there! 
Things are going much better, now that all connected devices have fully updated firmware and software. I also upgraded the eero router’s dns server to Cloudflare, which probably helped. No major glitches for the past week and my fingers are crossed. Thank you for your help.