Issue with Roon ARC playback interruption on Xperia 1 V (ref#1JYUUD)

What’s happening?

· I'm having trouble with Roon ARC

What best describes your issue with ARC

· Other

Describe the issue

Roon ARC randomly stops playing mid-track on Xperia 1 V. The playback resumes whenever ARC app is brought to focus (I reach to my pocket for phone, unlock it, select ARC and it starts playing again without me clicking play). I am currently able to reproduce the issue using Chrome/GMail apps in parallel to Roon ARC playing .flac file that is downloaded locally. The playback just interrupts, with adb logcat always showing "AudioFlinger: BUFFER TIMEOUT". When the sound does not drop, there is no buffer timeout reported by logcat.

What is also interesting is that ARC works perfectly fine in car with Android Auto with the same mobile device. I was trying to make Tidal fall victim to the same test while using Chrome/GMail, but somehow it is more resilent to other processes on the phone and I just can't make it stop playing, while ARC is easy to disrupt with normal phone usage that unfortunately seems to happen somewhat periodically and automatically while the phone sits idle in a pocket, too, resulting in my case in constant interruptions while playing.

Describe your network setup

WAN is symmetrical 1gb optics from T-Mobile, router is Sagemcom 5670v2, ROCK is running in a Proxmox VM on Ryzen 9 7940HS, wired connection to the router.

Hi @Rp1984,

Are you playing to a USB or Bluetooth device when this occurs, or the system output of the Xperia?

Does this occur with streaming content, or only with the local content you mentioned in your report? Any DSP profiles set up in ARC?

Please provide the name of a track that was playing when a dropout occurred or an approximate timestamp of the dropout - we’ll use that to pinpoint the event in our own diagnostics.

Thank you for the report.

Hi @connor,

I am playing through system output (jack connected headphones). But the issue happens both with wired headphones and bluetooth ones. It also happens both when streaming content over network and while playing local content. Normally I am using the following DSP profile:

I’ve reproduced few dropouts with different settings just now (Saturday, Jun 8, times in UTC+2):

  1. dropout at 22:25 - Rob Dougan: Frescobaldi’s Tocatta (orchestra session) - localy downloaded flac file on the phone, wired headphones, phone on 5G. At 22:29 I’ve just brought Roon ARC into focus and the playback continued. Using the above Muse profile.

  2. dropout at 22:33 - Rob Dougan: Vale (Ave atque vale) - locally downloaded flac, this time with “empty muse profile”. At 22:34 I’ve brought ARC into foreground, playback resumes. For the record, I’ve switched to this profile:

  3. dropout at 22:36 - Rob Dougan: The Return - locally downloaded flac, empty muse profile, this time Roon ARC is explicitly set to offline mode. 22:37 - bringing Roon back in focus. Interestingly clicking on ARC in the profile dialog says the content is streamed from Roon Server over mobile data while Roon is in offline mode - that can’t be true.

  4. dropout at 23:05 - Broadcast: March of the Fleas - TIDAL stream over Wifi, in sound profile there is just 44->48 conversion. At 23:06 ARC was brought to foreground, stream automatically resumes.

This hopefully rules out networking (due to 3), and DSP overhead (due to 2 and 3). Also the dropout never resumes by itself, and always resumes by bringing ARC to foreground. All I am doing to cause the dropout is that I enter Gmail, look at some spam messages etc, switch between Chrome and Gmail, reload some pages (originally I’ve found the issue while traveling, so I’ve been checking time / when / where to go next, nothing extreme, and it looked like network issue - but the fact that “network issue” always disappeared when Roon ARC was brought back to foreground caught my attention). Before the testing, I’ve closed all running applications on the phone.

As a wild guess, I’ve checked Tidal’s and Roon’s thread priorities using adb shell ps and they both seem to expectedly prioritize audio related functionality, yet the fact that Roon prioritizes all that is required for stable playback is not verifiable from my side.

Thanks for your help

Hey @Rp1984,

Thanks for sharing the above information! It will certainly help our team as we continue to investigate further.

In the meantime, could you please perform a fresh re-install of Arc and confirm the issue is still present?

With that, and my apologies if it’s been glazed over, have you also reproduced the issue while using the .apk download? Let me know if you’re able to give that a try as well - here’s the download link:

https://download.roonlabs.net/builds/RoonARC.apk

Hi, the issue is not present after reinstalling Roon ARC from the Play Store or the provided .apk link.

Was there some change at Roon’s side? If not, than I am pretty much clueless what I did to my phone to make it go away or what could have been the cause of it (I’ve uninstalled some things/disabled as much notifications and lock screen functionality as I could with the hope of making things a bit more stable but the issue was still there if I tried, yet after reinstall, all works without a single issue for several days now. Unfortunately I am not aware of build number I’ve had).

Thanks, I am sorry for the noise.