Is Roon ARC the best CarPlay music player? I mean it beats the ■■■■ out of Tidal, perhaps it’s at par with Apple Music.
Roon ARC is way better than Tidal and Apple Music to me as it also allows for my very own analogue to digital conversions in the car. It’s amazing. The app itself did not hang once since I installed this, in which Tidal always do.
I’ve always wanted to use ARC for CarPlay. But we know that there are things traditional mature apps can’t compete with. It’s stability. My ARC passed away quietly today as well. However, I hope that I can be reborn as many times as the phoenix and become stronger each time.
if you want to listen to CD’s that you’ve ripped to your library, or a playlist that combines sources, it’s great. (Provided all connectivity is copacetic.)
But for trouble-free playback and a better (at least to me) radio/seed algorithm, I still have a hard time beating spotify.
Sound quality in the car isn’t absolute top priority with a streamer. If I needed the absolute best sound, I’d probably put a CD in the player.
Apple Music in the car is the most stable. Haven’t tested much on Tidal lately, Qobuz is slowly improving. I did use Arc CarPlay when it launched but since I have to use it with VPN it got old quickly and I just use Apple Music in the car. It just works.
I would agree that ARC is the best music player, but the stability is not reaching Apples App. It’s an unfair comparison, due to the more complex architecture of ARC compared to Apple, but it sucks to get frequent error messages due to connection problems etc.
Nowhere near!
Far too many features missing. Even though Tidal took a long time to add a favourite button, it’s now there. Tidal, is finally making use of all the features available via CarPlay, ARC is not. It’s got a long way to go. I’ve given up with it for now (again). It’s just not stable enough, and I find Tidal, YT Premium, Deezer a much richer experience. But, I’ll load up ARC when I want an album that I can’t find.
Tidal crashes and acts scitzofrenically, and highly unstable in my experience. Roon ARC did not fail me yet, though it has some U/X glitches( unable to scroll through filtered and recent finds )
IBroadcast works flawlessly for me.
ARC connects when it wants, is SLOOOOOW, and does not restart playback after a phone call like Apple Music. I rarely use it in the car. I might use it more if I could hand over my Roon queue to ARC. It’s very far from the best CarPlay player
No, there is no search feature - it’s DOA
There are two major problems with ARC that I see (I am on Android 14):
One, I like ARC, when it works. I mean, sometimes it just doesn’t connect. Typical is, it works when I drive somewhere, to the store say. Park the car. Come out, and the song that was cached plays, but that’s it, it can’t load any more songs.
A solution to that is to force kill ARC, or if you can’t do that, reboot the phone, then it’ll work again. This indicates that it’s not actual internet connectivity to your library that is the issue. In the store sure, possibly I don’t have decent signal strength, but I wasn’t using ARC in the store. Looks like ARC is running in the background and get’s hung when it looses connectivity and can’t get going again when that connectivity is restored.
So, that’s a stability / robustness issue.
Two, it doesn’t show me everything I have in my library. It shows some things, and if I search for some songs that I can find with Roon when I’m on my LAN, heck if I can get that song to show up in ARC when I’m out of the house. It’s a bit weird, I haven’t exactly figured it out what ARC does and doesn’t see. Definately not everything.
That’s a functionality issue. I don’t expect it to be a full-fledged Roon experience on the go, that’s fine. I would however like to be able to find all my music and play it, even if it’s a more simplistic experience.
