Loss connection with Internal audio zone

Hello,

this already happened twice in the space of an hour.
I am playing music on Roon on my iMac running HighSierra, after a while of radio selection Roon stop playing and the iMac zone disappear. I tried to open the Sound on the System preferences and I got a Preferences Error - Could not load Sound preference Pane.
I rebooted the machine and Roon was back again but after 3 songs again same problem.
Any idea what this could be?

thanks

Marco

Are you using Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil software? That sounds like a situation with that software. If so, see this thread for solution:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8088933?answerId=32297795022#32297795022

Thanks Daniel, I don’t have such software.
Just to give a little more context, Roon was on and was playing Radio, at a certain point he played a 96 kHz/24 bit local file, then a track from Tidal 44.1/16 and then moved to a local file track 44.1kHz at 24 bit. The last track showed the waveform but no sound. Eventually Roon skipped it, moved it as skipped track and started a new one, same thing happened the track was moved in the history as skipped track. Eventually Roon stopped pretending to play anything and showed the label choose an audio zone and the in-built output was not there anymore. I tried to switch on my USB connected Mytek and it didn’t show up either. Then I tried to check the preferences in the system and I got the error. I killed Roon and restarted without success soI rebooted the machine and Roon started to work again. So I went in the history I moved the skipped tracks back down in the queue maintaining the same sequence, first the 96k, then the tidal, then the 44.1/24 and BANG exactly same behaviour. Play the first 2 hang up on the third. Again I reboot the machine and tried again. Just to make sure I also did a OSX update that was pending in case there was something in there…
Once up I tried to play the last track the 44.1/24bit to check if there was something wrong with the track but everything was playing as expected. At that point I tried again to go in the history and move the 3 track down in the queue, again machine hang up. I started to think that the crash was due to the order certain song with a given format were played. So after the following reboot I cleaned the history and handpicked the 3 famous tracks from the library in the same order. I started with the first one and did play now, then I selected the second one and did play next and finally I got to the third one and did add to the queue. At that point the 3 tracks played fine and the radio moved on, so with my theory proved wrong I move forward waiting for another crash that didn’t happen all yesterday.

BTW I saved the Logs (RAAT and Roon) and I know at what time and whichsongs that were playing so if someone want to have a look and try to figure out what happened I can provide them.

cheers
M

Hello @Marcor,

Let’s try resetting your RAAT Server. To do this first make sure you have closed Roon, then go to your ~/library/ folder and rename the “RAATServer” to “RAATServer_old”. The next time you start Roon, it will generate a new RAATServer install.

Another way to test is to create a new user account on your Mac, installing Roon to that user account, and trying playback. This could be related to a driver or kernel extension on your Mac that is causing this instability, so the new user may not have these issues. If this is the case, we can try and detect what is causing this on your main account.

-John

Ok, I renamed the RAAT Server and started ROON. I then recreated the built-in output and the mytek one that disappeared in the process.
Now music is playing, I will report back if anything else happen.

thanks
M

unluckily it happened again.
/radio started, played 2 songs and stopped at the third one, no sound coming out, closed soon and the audio zone disappeared once started again

Hello @Marcor,

Do you have any other audio drivers installed on your Core’s operating system? Your symptoms indicate that there is something installed on your iMac that may be interfering with Roon’s ability to interface with your devices. Does this behavior happen on other computers in the household?

-John

Hi @john

I don’t have any audio installed on my iMac, just to give you the full picture.
my iMac is a 2017 3.4GHz Core i5 and serve me as roon core.
The iMac has a Mytek Brooklyn connected through USB (no specific audio driver), also via ethernet serves a raspberry pie with IQaudio Dac+ as /hat. Also I use Roon Air to send music to my Devialet Core (latest version).
The loss connection started happening one week ago and has been happening only on the core. However when the core disappear the mytek also disappear. This has never happened on the raspberry pie and hasn’t ever happened on the devialet before but to be honest I haven’t use it last week so I cannot really say.
On thing to add, last week when this happened I was able to replicate the behaviour moving the song that caused the issue from the skipped to the queue, yesterday when I rebooted the mac after the audio crash I also updated to the new version of Roon. At that point when I moved the track from the skipped history to the queue it played without problems. Not sure if was a coincidence or due to the new Roon update.
thanks for helping me out on this

cheers
M

Hello @Marcor,

Are you still seeing the same behavior? One thing I would like for you to try is to play to the iMac’s CoreAudio output for an extended period of time and see if that is stable for you. Do you have any of the Devialet software installed on your iMac?

-John

Hi @john

unluckily these days I am quite busy at work and I am not able to give it a good go. I will try as soon as I can at the latest will be during the weekend.
Regarding devialet software, no I completely uninstalled AIR to avoid any possible problem.
thanks
Marco