Hi, I have spent weeks carrying out experiments trying to work out exactly what causes my Apple Mac based Roon system to randomly stop playing Live Radio. The system contains 3 Mac Minis, a Mac Mini Studio, a iMac and maybe an iPhone in the garden. I like to have music on whichever room I’m in
The conclusion is that Roon is not compatible with Time Machine. If Time Machine is running on any of the Macs, either they be a Roon Server or an Endpoint, then Live Radio will stop sooner or later. It even has problems if the only machine running Time Machine is one of the Endpoints and it is not actively playing anything!
If you look in the RoonServer log at the time the system stops, the first Warn message entry may look similar to
“[zoneplayer/raat] Too many dropouts (>3s dropped out in the last 30s). Killing stream”
You might think this is due to a network problem. Some people suggest using a different DNS. But I think this is down to 2 parts of Roon failing to complete some sort of handshake because they cannot cope with whatever Time Machine is doing. Turn Time Machine off on all machines; the Warning message does not happen and the radio station plays for days. Incidentally, if I use the URL from Roon to play the same internet radio station using the Safari browser, then that will also play for days. Which implies the internet connection itself is fine and the problem is with Roon Live Radio.
Another Warn message you may see at the start of stopping is
“[.NET ThreadPool Worker] could not run /usr/sbin/diskutil info -plist ‘com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/Backups.backupdb/Roon Mac mini/2025-01-15-183845/MusicStore’ – Exit code was: 1”
No idea what this actually means but turn Time Machine off and the message goes away.
Both of these Warn messages are followed by others and the system stops playing.
Along the way I’ve tried:
- Wiring the RoonServer Mac Mini directly to my router
- Running a single Roon Endpoint on the RoonServer
- Running a single Roon Endpoint on a different Mac mini to the RoonServer
- Rebuilding Roon on all the machines
- Checked all the ethernet cables in the system
- Streaming from Qobuz instead of Live Radio
- Backing up with Carbon Copy Cloner does not cause a problem
- Ensuring Time Machine is not backing up the Roon database
- Turning off Roon’s new music files discovery feature
A suggested ‘solution’ is to only run Time Machine when Roon is not playing. This rather defeats the objective of a backup system. If the machine playing Roon is also your main office machine then you really want Time Machine’s half hour backups running automatically all the time. And you don’t want your radio station to stop even half hour or so!
I’ve previously raised a Support request but didn’t really get anywhere.