I have to agree about ARC. When I’m away, I just use my Samsung music app with 1500+ songs I have on an SD card in my phone and tablet.
I tried to get ARC to work twice and gave up after those failures. Life’s too short. After turning 77, I figure I’m in the last half of my life and don’t want to waste the remaining 77 years.
This is purely speculation on your part, and there is nothing here to support this view.
What do you mean here? Are you attempting to stream lossless or using ARC to receive a transcoded OPUS stream?
While I use an alternative to ARC at times, it is still my preferred player. So, I welcome the recent improvements, even if some problems persist. I’m also pretty certain that ARC development comes from a different team to Roon server/bridge/GUI, Roon OS, and cloud. Roon and ARC continue to receive regular updates, the last about ten days ago.
For all we know, Roon 3.0 may be somewhere over the horizon.
Again, please note that I have no insider knowledge and my view is based on nearly a decade of reading posts here and in the old Alpha category.
My experience is: If you subscribe to Tidal/Qobuz, you’re probably better off using their apps ‘on the road’. If you have a large local library, ARC maybe a way to hear it ‘on the road’, IF you download the albums and are not bothered by the album art disappearing in ‘Airplane mode’.
As the original poster I will reply
This was not meant to be a critique of ARC , good or bad but has sorta gone that way.
My original question was really as what I perceive as a niche product within a niche product , is it fair to disproportionately spend resources on ARC when the main app requires a lot more attention than it’s getting. There are many outstanding features and I am sure bugs too for the main app to keep the dev team busy but my perception is that releases are biased to ARC. Is that because ARC has proportionally more issues who knows
There seems to be a lot of unsubstantiated “statistics” about ARC’s usage . We as a user base have no idea how many Roon users there are let alone how many of those use ARC and how many of those successfully
We do have some idea about how many forum users use ARC.
.sjb
I am one of the few who stayed with Roon 1.8 since I used PlexAmp for portable and did not want to sacrifice non-internet access to Roon. Every now and then I check in to see if there have been Roon developments that might justify me to reconsider my decision. In all this time, as you noted, all I ever see on the site are posts about updates related to ARC. So I guess I am happy with my choice which is very stable and reliable. Grateful that Roon gave users the option at the time. I still wish that Roon had not gone down the ARC path but others seem to be very happy with it.
This restriction to always require Internet in 2.0 was lifted a year ago or so.
Not sure where you are looking but clearly that’s just not the case:
Can you steer me to where it says that. I never received any notice that this was no longer an issue. I would gladly update if that is the case.
The above was even pinned at the top of the forum here for about a month or so.
You can subscribe to the Software Release Notes category, then you get a forum notification or email (depending on your forum notification settings) for every new announcement.
That is great to know. I missed the upgrade post and there was never any mail notice. Thanks so much.
There was a marketing e-mail that contained a link to the full blog post (the abbreviation didn’t contain the information discussed here). The acquisition was quite a news to share.
Roon ARC is a perfect example of how make something simple, incredibly difficult.
Also, one of the only pieces of software I know that is gradually getting worse, release by release. From a software design perspective it’s pretty dumb. I need to maintain a connection to my actual hub, in 2025.
Just a thought. Roon could run Tidal and Qobuz services centrally, my music library could be exported to Roon, as metadata, just the library not content. Such that I see my library but stream from Roon.
There must be a reason the awkward, unreliable architecture they chose is still in place.
And today it only works in the foreground.
I use ARC 90% of the time, so this makes me happy. 
Nice, glad to hear it.
i use ARC 0% hence the question
While I do not know the exact statistics but there were quite a few constantly harping about remote access for an extended time and then Roon justified this implentation to much fan fare at no extra cost to users.
This bold well with me because I never intended to use Arc and I am glad that there was no additional cost to me and others who do not wish to use Arc ever.
If I am out and about and I want to listen to music, I will use Tidal or Spotify without any issues ever.
Again, grateful for No Additional Cost to me and others who do not use it.
–MD
I dont use Arc for playback but I do use it to add music to my listen later when I get recommendations from people or see something out and about I wish to revisit.
I have a 1Tb SD card in my phone, USBPlayer Pro and Sony W1000 MXl
Does me fine , iam using as we speak
It never fails or drops out
