Mac OS Big Sur 11.3 versus Roon

Since I installed Big Sur 11.3, Roon cannot play to other devices…limited to Mac mini speakers. In Audio setup, enabling a Roon Ready device makes it jump all over the interface making it nearly impossible to disable the device. I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling with no change. I do not know how to completely and totally uninstall Roon Core. Need help to get back to distributing music beyond the Mac mini on which Roon Core is installed.

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On the Core machine:

User Home folder
Hit option-period to display Library folder
Library>

Delete Roon folder
Delete RAATServer

That will delete everything.

If I were you, I’d back it up first. If you have no database changes (playlists, hearts, bookmarks, tags), then a music folder rescan and a trip to the Settings panel in Roon will get you set up. Check your Preferences folder, which is also in the Library folder, for any file with “Roon” in the name.

Thank you, Andrew. I seem to be 100% incompetent. My reinstalled Roon Core behaves as if nothing happened. All my profiles, streaming accounts, history, everything were intact. I did not have to log in. It just started right up and the problem persists. No change with inability to connect to Roon Ready devices. When I go to Audio settings to choose devices, and enable a Roon Ready device, the enabled device flashes on and off making the whole list of devices jump up and down. Thanks for trying to help me. I truly appreciate it.

Everybody is incompetent until they learn what they need to know.

When you deleted your Roon Core installation, did you get all the stuff in your Library folder? If everything was still intact when you started up Roon again, it suggests that you did not.

Core
Applications> Roon (Or Roon Server)
User Library - as above

Control Device (laptop or other desktop, if that’s what you’re using)
Applications>Roon
User Library - As above

Hi, Andrew. I was able to follow your advice and was successful in fully removing and reinstalling Roon. I learned that to get to the library I had to follow these steps. I know that you do not need to know this, but in case someone is following this thread, I am posting it for similarly novice level users such as I.

  1. Open Finder and click Go in the top bar
  2. Hold down the Option key (or Alt)(⌥) to unhide the Library folder
  3. Click the Library folder
  4. Find and trash or delete immediately the Roon and RAATServer folders

What happened? I was able to enable my Roon Ready sources whereas I could not do so before reinstalling. Each Roon Ready speaker (Bluesound Pulse Flex 2i) would play for a few seconds if I streamed a radio station such as Radio Paradise. My Airplay Oppo Sonica speaker played the radio stream with dropouts. As soon as I would try to stream an album from Qobuz or Tidal the Roon Ready speakers become highly unstable and finally disappeared altogether. The Airplay speaker would not play. The Roon Ready speakers remained unstable through cycling disable/enable and would stabilize only after uninstalling Roon. Then would become unstable again as described above.

This sounds like a network problem, doesn’t it? So I took a Bluesound Pulse Flex 2i speaker and my Mac mini over to the Wi-Fi router (TP-Link) and plugged them both into Ethernet ports on the back of the router. I got the same results. I am seeing a few other posts in the support area that have symptoms that might be similar (but not identical) to mine. I’m going to attempt to describe this crazy issue in the support column.

Thank you very much for your help, Andrew, and wish me luck with my Roon issues!

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You are most welcome, and I do indeed wish you luck.

Hi, Andrew. Your well wishes worked. I have discovered the cause of my problem is Vulnerability Protection. It is part of the Norton 360 Firewall and can be switched off separately from firewall connection blocking. I switch off Vulnerability Protection when I want to connect to a playback device. I switch it back on and playback works (except Airplay) until I restart Roon. Then I have to switch it off to reconnect to my playback devices, and can switch it back on as soon as I have reconnected. (If I leave it switched off, Airplay works.) I do not know what Vulnerability Protection Exceptions to set to completely remedy my problem. I am going to work with Norton support. It turns out that Apple is incrementally deprecating extensions Norton (and others) used to enable Vulnerability Protection. Despite receiving advance notice from Apple, Norton failed to revise their code to stop using the extensions. Many Norton users could not connect to NAS without switching off Norton Vulnerability Protection. It took Norton about 4 months to fix the problem, but Roon is not fixed. I was running Roon jist fine until I did a Mac OS upgrade and an additional element of extensions were deprecated making Norton impede my Roon connections. --Alex