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
OK, anyone’s choice, but it is the same with every streaming app on the phone, so that’s not specific to ARC
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.
Combination of buggy ARC and additional data plan is the issue.
OK. That wasn’t clear from “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.”
Obviously, ARC must become much more reliable in general and when offline. Fully agree
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.
“I do not use static IP addresses”
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.
Or simply tell the router to assign the same address by DHCP to the core every time. Achieves the same without messing around with a static address.
This currently stops working basically every day now. Sometimes it’ll work for hours and other times i’ll get 1/2 tracks before having to restart the server. This isn’t much use when the time i use it is outside the house…
For me, ARC has been a positive game changer. I use it everyday in my vehicle and do not have any of the issues others are reporting here. I use a Verizon 5G mobile hotspot and a Fiio M11 plus.
For me, ARC works quite well right now.
One issue I have: “My library / albums” is up to date in ARC on my phone but not in CarPlay in my car. There it does not show the albums I added in the last 12 weeks or so.
Thank you for the suggestion. I will have to sit down and really look into this. I am definitely not an IT person, I really muddle through it, but I was able to get port forwarding working and because I have to fix port forwarding so often after power outages, port forwarding is now a breeze. I know my limitations and having to dig deeper into the advanced settings of the router, or the NAS does not excite me, haha.
The router will usually list the connected devices by their network names, and somewhere (in the router’s general DHCP settings or maybe in its device-specific settings) there is probably some checkbox or similar for “always assign same IP address” or some such wording. The router manual certainly explains it
Hi Stephen. Maybe this can help:
DHCP Reservations - 5 Reasons You Need to Assign a Permanent Address to Devices on Your Network
Torben