At least most Vodafone Germany customers with residential (home) accounts are connected by DS Lite tech which does not provide an IPv4 address that can be port-forwarded.
There are exceptions, such as people who ever asked for a proper IPv4 address when they were still available in residential contracts, or customers of ISPs who provided such an address and were later acquired by Vodafone. Some customers may have been put on a proper IPv4 for technical reasons (this may have happened without informing the customer), and itās possible that some regions in Germany differ as well. Such addresses are not part of the residential contracts and can be taken away at any time, though currently they seem to be leaving them in place if they exist.
Currently, if you only have a residential account with DS Lite, your options are:
Ask Vodafone nicely if they can enable a public, routeable IPv4 address that you can use for port forwarding. This apparently works best by calling the technical hotline and hoping for the right person on the line. Or try a post on the VF forum. Note that the contract does not promise you such a thing and it would be a good-will gesture that they may or may not grant (the likelihood of which seems to be changing over time and depending on who you talk to, and it can be taken away at any time)
EDIT: According to investigation by @Thomas_Forster and others, people who use their own routers and not rented from VF get a routable address. Not sure whether there are additional factors, and how VF deals with this long-term.
Switch to a Vodafone Business account, where such an IPv4 address is part of the contract. I just did that (see my recent posts) and it turned out to be no more expensive than a residential contract (depending on your current contract and which new ones you choose), and it has some additional perks. This is what I would recommend.
Dick around with other solutions like DynDNS to make it work with the DS Lite address. Seems too much hassle to me. Depending on where you live, you may also be able to switch to a different ISP who includes IPv4 options in residential accounts.
Game changer? No. A good value add for my existing subscription? Yes. Good value add indeed for me. I like having the ability to download all of my playlists and listen to them in my car. About 95% of my library is local.
There is a feature request open for that one so if you have any of your 6 votes unallocated you might like to vote for it here - Option to convert downloaded files [done]
I am only interested in Roon ARC for offline listening so for me this one is the show-stopper missing feature right now since download my entire local library to my phone.
I have a relatively small local library by the standards of many people here, only about 700 albums. Compressed to 256kbs AAC or Opus, or even 320kbs AAC which is what I currently use when downloading my library to Apple Music on my iPhone, it is entirely practical to put everything I have on my phone even though currently I still choose the lowest storage capacity 128GB phone when I upgrade. (I donāt do photos or video so music is the only think on my phone that really uses any significant amount of storage.)
I was hoping for ARC to be a game changer but it just doesnāt work well for me. It will play a song or 2 and then stop playing with a āpoor connectionā message. This is even when connected to WiFi. I have no problem with Amazon Music or Qobuz streaming even when in the car but ARC just doesnāt work well enough. I tried for a few days but just deleted it from my phone. I am using an iPhone 14 Pro and have a strong 5G signal in most of the area I drive in. 2.0 is more of a hindrance than an improvement to me as now if there is an internet outage at home, Roon becomes totally useless.
I think ARC is awesome and brings tremendous value to me. My library is 100% Qobuz, no local files.
There are some niggles and room for improvement - it sure would be nice to use ARC completely offline. But I understand there are technical and licensing challenges, so maybe it happens or maybe it never does.
In any case, I love listening to music away from home. Until ARC, my Roon library hasnāt been available to me in a practical way. I used Apple Music, which is great for its comprehensive library and gazillions of playlists. But Roon smacks it around when it comes to discovery. Apple Music ādiscoveryā is all about marketing, whereas Roon discovery is actually about the music.
Apple Music is relegated to places where I donāt have network connectivity.
Most importantly, Iām happy to spend more time with my Roon collection, finding albums, tagging, making playlists, etc, because I can make use of it away from my home.
Roon has room for a lot of improvement unrelated to ARCā¦ but ARC breaks down the divide between home listening and elsewhere, and to me that is a Very Big Deal.
Used Arc all day and even though I was in my works van with CarPlay, connect via USB I did notice a clear difference in SQ between Tidals app in CD quality when compared to Arc set to CD quality.
I wish my vans head unit had a 3.5mm aux input, Iād then use my Dragonfly Cobalt. Oh well.
My view on Arc from my first post in this thread, is yes, Arc is a game changer. Better sound quality over my streaming providers own app.
Or was me testing biased as I knew which was which?
I cancelled my Spotify subscription and deleted the app since ARC.
Even when simply listening to all of my music in shuffle, Roon is much more diverse than Spotify. Spotify always kinda gave me the same stuff over and over, and there were parts of my library it never went to. With ARC Iām now listening to stuff I havenāt listened to in years. Not to mention the Radio capabilities which are wonderful. And the SQ is noticeably better even with the Balanced setting (not that itās surprising in any way when comparing to Spotify).
I think introducing ARC was the next logical step. Both of us made the switch because of it.
Did you read this article in The Guardian? I think there are a lot more people like us. With ARC, making the switch became a lot easier when it comes to functionality.
I read that article. Not seeing myself quitting all streaming services, but using Roon does put you a bit more in the driverās seat. I had an itch to quit Spotify since the whole story with Neil Young, but the Tidal app just wasnāt good enough for me. With ARC this obstacle is gone.
I have to say I was seriously sceptical; UK FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) upload speeds are absolutely glacial, and I just didnāt see how streaming over 4G from the home was ever going to work.
Well I couldnāt have been more wrong. Driving through the Pennines with notoriously bad reception it has been rock solid so far. My next phone isnāt going to need a load of storage for copies of albums to be playable in iTunes, or whatever itās called these days. When my phone next needs replacing, I might well spend the money saved on a lifetime subā¦
Setup was a piece of cake once Iād realised that I needed to enable UPnP on my Unifi network. Having read loads of stuff about how UPnP was a Bad Thing, I disabled it and set up a Port Forwarding rule, which couldnāt have been simpler.
I didnāt consider it a game changer until I started using it. I have my local library, Tidal and Qobuz. It is great to be in my car or at someone elseās home and use ARC to pull in music from all three places. I am no longer restricted to stream from only one service at a time. Roon Radio on the go is great.
For me, just another iteration of remote music players. Started w/Subsonic, then went to Plex (still use) and now Roon, all have pluses/minuses. Choice is good.
Check out my post here for the long story: