I live in Florida, USA and, as in South Africa apparently, data rates (or services offering unlimited data) are prohibitively expensive (especially for folks living on fixed incomes – and yes, many folks of modest means also love music and quality audio…)
Here in Florida lightning storms are, as many in the US may know, a very common occurrence throughout a very long summer season. I routinely shut down all my electronics during such outbreaks and when travelling during the season.
Many parts of Florida, including the one I live in, are routinely, if not frequently, plagued with power outages and ambiguous fluctuations caused by a lot of factors – all adding up to ARC being, at least while away from home for any period longer than a day, basically useless.
I’ve used soundiiz to make sure all my playlists are duplicated on qobuz so I can use their app to play the stuff I want remotely.
I imagine many “use cases” will make the answer to @Loke_Kwang_Han’s question a very vigorous, “Nope” for folks who value Roon as an in-home solution and have little use for the rather ungainly mobile ARC in light of other, more elegant and reliable, solutions.
I noted a user last October noted that Roon Arc could not shuffle through large libraries and handle large playlists and am wondering whether that’s still the case after the latest update
In order to get bit perfect audio to the DAC I have to leave the Sample Rate Conversion to “For combatibilty only” setting. The other settings on offer
do work but are not ideal for me.
I would like the DAC to play the original sample rate of the track. UAPP, HiBy Music and even the Tidal app do this without any issue.
BTW my FIIO BTR5 works well with Roon ARC, but not the Hiby FC6.
Was a member of the early release program and ran it for a couple of weeks from my office. Was the only use case I could think of as streaming on a cellular plan is not a viable option when it comes to data use.
Too many hiccups and issues with the frequent changes in ARC along with occasional trouble with my firewalls made me stop using it. Game changer for me? No.
While driving a car, I don’t need everything Roon offers. I need reliability and simplicity. I don’t want to take my eyes off the road to fix a broken connection or fiddle with little buttons to operate the thing. My in-car hardware platform is an iPhone secured on a dashboard mount and connected via USB cable. Every time I’ve tried ARC, I’ve had playback problems. iTunes (/ Apple Music) seems to work better. On short trips, even that usually isn’t worth messing with. I often just listen to FM radio.
Depends on the plan and where you are. In many countries, unlimited plans (or at least very large allowances) are easy to come by or even a pretty standard offer. I see you are in Germany - for some examples, the smallest Telekom plan starts with 10 GB, the medium Vodafone has 50 and is unlimited if you also have Vodafone home internet. It’s easily viable even with 10 GB if using lossy and not streaming all the time.
Game changing in that it’s quite frankly the most unreliable part of Roon and has a habit of hanging your core without rhyme nor reason so you can’t play music at home either without a reboot.
Same here with my iPhone USB- connected to my car. Apple Music works fine, so does Apple PodCasts.
Third party Apps like Qobuz or Roon Arc give me playback problems. The first tracks plays like it should, following tracks play for few seconds then skip to the next.
What kind of car do you drive? Mine is 2015 Focus with the bare bone radio.
From the user‘s manual the car should not communicate with the iPhone at all. The USB is only there to play MP3s from a thumb drive.
So I get way more than I paid for.
Roon works well in my environment. Wenn it comes to ARC, it does not work most of the time. In my house it works, but there I do not need it. When traveling I use only the native apps from Qobuz, Tidal and Apple Music. But I gave up on ARC. I have not uninstalled it. I try it now and then, but I would not call it a game changer. It is more a terminator.
I had given up on Roon ARC but now use it when I leave home and only want to have one device with me for albums I’ve downloaded for offline listening on an iPhone 15 with USB C and an Astell&Kern DAC and the sound quality of hi-res and dsd albums is fantastic.
Otherwise, I listen to my own music on an Astell & Kern DAP
I have a 10 GB plan which if fine for my daily use and this determines my limit. If I had to go for a larger data plan and had to deal with the issues of ARC, I wouldn’t be a happy camper. Thanks, but no
I drive a 2016 Volvo XC60. I think that was a model year behind the integration of Apple Carplay (or Android Auto) into the XC60. At least one USB port is tied into Volvo’s older dashboard infotainment system (“Sensus Connect” or some such). With the system I have, once I’ve queued up a playlist I can hit next/previous (etc.) from buttons on the steering column. But if there is any glitch in the playback (which is not uncommon), I typically need to pull over to get it going again.
This same scenario has killed ARC for me. I do not use static IP addresses, so when my South Florida power goes out for a period of time and power returns, the router assigns my Roon Core a different IP address, so until I can get home and change the port forwarding to the new Core IP address, ARC is totally useless. Florida is the lightning capital, and you can set your watch by the afternoon power outages during the summer’s thunderstorms. I now consider ARC a total failure instead of an enhancement. I do not use ARC anymore; it is not worth the aggravation. I really do hope Roon seriously rethinks the full-time internet requirement. For me, ARC isn’t worth it, but I am only one person.
May I ask why? Because you seem to be ruling out the obvious solution here, and the reason for me is not clear. I use a static IP for my core and even though I have configured it to reboot periodically, ARC keeps working like charm.