Issue using Roon over tailscale

[Krist_van_Besien]

I have a weird issue.

I have a ROON running at home (in a container) and at home everything works fine. I have the Roon client on my ipad, and when on the home wifi I have the choice of playing music to SONOS, or to “system” which allows me to listen using my headphones.

I use tailscale as a vpn and when traveling I can use this VPN to access my mediaservers at home. Eg. I use that to access my jellyfin instance to watch movies.

However when I use roon the server is seen, I see my music, but I cannot start playback to “system”, only to my sonos. Which is useless when away from home.

Why is that? Why does the option “system” disappear when I am on a VPN?

[Johnny_Ooooops (Listener in Chief)]

Because UDP multicast packets do not cross subnets, and that is how endpoint discovery works. If you install Tailscale on the same device that is running the core (windows, Mac, synology, but obviously not a ROCK because you can’t) this should work.

[Piotr_Pekala]

The other option is to add subnet routing in Tailscale.
Then it can be installed on any machine in the same subnet.

[Johnny_Ooooops (Listener in Chief)]

@Piotr_Pekala

The other option is to add subnet routing in Tailscale.

I actually don’t think that will work (though I have not tried it) for the same reason that UDP broadcast packets won’t make it across subnets.

[Piotr_Pekala]

You might be right.

Success with Tailscale VPN

This might be of interest to anyone who’s been struggling to get Roon working over a VPN. I installed Tailscale VPN on my roon server and on my iPhone… and it just worked. No extra configuration or tinkering required. Roon Remote auto-detection and streaming work over the VPN connection. Tailscale is a commercial VPN based on Wireguard, it’s free for personal use. I’ve found it to be excellent. https://tailscale.com

This thread suggests that it’s impossible.

I tried that some time ago to run Remote over tailscale although local playback wasn’t my goal. I noticed similar behavior but thought that it doesn’t work due to ACLs. Had to be wrong.

[Johnny_Ooooops (Listener in Chief)]

Well, I think it (meaning playing to a remote on a device that is running Tailscale) will work if you have Tailscale running on the same device as your core. There are no subnets to traverse in that case. Again, never done it, but that’s my impression.