I have had intermittent issues with live radio for at least a year. But recently it has become particularly bad. Half a news story will drop out, making it unintelligible, or the punchline of a joke goes missing. There are no issues with music (Qobuz) streaming. But generally no feedback was provided. Today it finally gave me an error message of Metadata Service Error ETIMEDOUT, which led me to the now closed discussion of the same issue from a year ago that did not appear to have been resolved - Intermittent dropouts in Roon Live Radio streams (ref#GKIS91)
I run Roon on a Mac, and a generally streaming the radio to a Sonos speaker in the kitchen as I cook, currently over airplay (following advice on the forum that this was more stable than Sonos protocols). As I say it’s just the radio that’s giving me problems. The Sonos network is hardwired, although this speaker connects over wireless (using a robust MESH network)
I think this is unconnected as it this issue is affecting all metadata service related stations (although obviously something awry - pinging @alec_eiffel who is the chap who set this service up).
Something else is not right in your setup - moving this to Support .
If it’s only BBC streams, you may be hitting the same issue I had a while back. The short answer is ‘try google dns’. The longer answer (not that we definitively worked out what was going on) is here…
Might be worth a try while support are thinking about it…
.. and not anymore… This affects all METADATA SERVICE streams. My guess is that Roon staff is working on fixing the issues I have reported (I can see in my logs that one of them has been solved) but may have created others
Not much I can do, my master server is working fine, this is on the Roon side.
We reviewed the diagnostic report from your Roon Server, and it appears the recent dropouts were caused by packet lossbetween your Roon Server and the Sonos (Kitchen) via AirPlay.
To help us narrow this down, could you please confirm if Radio streams also drop on your other endpoints (such as the local System Output or any wired zones)?
This will help us determine if the issue is specific to the AirPlay connection or related to the incoming stream itself.
OK @alex-h - so to address all that I’ve tried since posting (as of course nothing happens in isolation).
I had changed the DNS server from Cloudflare to Google and that correlated with the dropouts becoming far more frequent (obviously correlation is not causation, especially on an n=1 sample) - that would be when you had diagnosed the packet losses.
With that in mind I went into the Sonos app looking at available settings (knowing that Sonos set up a wireless network of their own) and changed the channel it uses from 10 to 6. I also ran network optimisation on my mesh network - my 2.4 and Sonos networks are definitely running on different channels - I am close to neighbours’ and their WiFi which I must bear in mind.
Following this I have no problems at the moment - 30 minutes of clear radio play in the kitchen this evening as well as periods uninterrupted radio on two other end points today - there was not a time when I had issues in the kitchen that I had tested other endpoints, so apologies for not addressing your question, but I am hoping that is now moot.
I will continue to monitor and will consider it closed once this has held for a few days. But very good signs, all resulting from you telling me that packets were dropping - thank you
