ARC requires a connection to your Core in order to run. Just as with Roon, you will have the best experience if core is running at all times.
If your Core should go offline for a short period of time (for example a brief power outage), ARC will re-establish a connection as soon as the Core comes back online. If your Core is truly off or unreachable, you will need to rectify that in order to continue using ARC.
If you wish to use ARC without a network connection, for example on an airplane or on a hike with no connectivity, you can play albums and playlists that you have downloaded to ARC in advance.
I’m wondering how to reconcile the 2nd and third paragraphs. Just how long will Roon ARC tolerate not being able to connect to its home core before the user needs to “rectify that in order to continue using ARC”. I’ll be going on a 10 day trip in a month’s time with 28 hours of travel each way and then on overseas mobile data so really not wanting to use any more traffic than necessary. Will Roon ARC continue to let me play downloaded content even if it hasn’t been able to connect to my Core for days or even weeks or will it eventually run out of patience and tell me that I need to connect to my Core again or else it’s going to go on strike?
In another thread in the last hour a Roon staff member posted to say that 30 day grace period doesn’t exist anymore for 2.0. If you want the grace period you have to stay on 1.8 so I assume the situation with Roon ARC being disconnected is different, or at least I hope so.
This is a bit off-topic, but I wanted to point out that this 30-day grace period is not true for 2.0 Roon Core. 2.0 requires internet access, regardless of whether you use ARC or not. If you need the Core to have offline access, you must say on 1.8 Legacy.
Brian is typing a response to the OP, so I’ll let him answer the on-topic question
ARC lets you play your downloads for 14 days with no internet connection.
To reset that 14 day clock, it needs to talk to our cloud servers to confirm your license. All you would need to do to reset the 14 day clock is start the app with an internet connection briefly so it can talk to our servers. The core is not required.
Brilliant. Thanks Brian. You really knocked it out of the park with this release. I honestly wasn’t at all confident that Roon mobile (I should be saying Roon ARC now I suppose) would meet my I-want-everything-downloaded-to-my-phone requirements but with the “everything” playlist trick and this not-at-all-onerous periodic license revalidation requirement I think this is going to work really well for me even to the extent of supporting transcoding of downloaded files to lossy to save space on my device. Just fantastic.
