I’m getting really sick of Roon. Lately, I spend much more time hearing silence and looking for remedies than hearing music.
I’ve been using Roon on my Synology NAS for a few months with mostly a reasonable level of dropout perturbance. However, as of the last few weeks, ceteris paribus, I am struggling to hear music on roon. I’m lucky if I get to hear two songs in a row!
What’s going on and why can’t Roon work properly over a home network?
I’m seriously considering just reverting to JRiver.
AceRimmer
(Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!)
2
It seems a little odd that you have been struggling with Roon and yet this is your first post?
This forum exists to try and assist users and it might have helped if you had posted sooner so the community could have tried to help you so you did not get to this level of frustration.
So with all of that being said do you think you could fill in the blanks for everyone and complete the question template that was presented when you made this post.
Sorry you are having troubles, but we all do at times. You need to fill out the bold type categories so we can see what you are working with and somebody will be able to help you out. For example, is your NAS the Roon Core, is your library on the same NAS, are you using Ethernet, are you using wireless, what are your endpoints, etc?
The standout from your post is you seem to think there is an acceptable level of poor performance. I do not get any pauses, silence or dropouts. And I don’t use a NAS to host Roon.
My synology DS418play is and has always been my Roon Core. I have been using this setup to good results since November '22.
Typically I use my laptop to stream to an iFi Zen streamer for headphone use or use my phone with Roon to stream to a PS Audio directstream DAC with Network Bridge II.
My NAS/core is cabled by ethernet to my router.
My Zen and PS devices receive a wifi signal through TP link wifi extenders which are cabled by ethernet to those devices.
I know the use of extenders is discouraged for Roon but, as before, it was working tolerably well until recently. I say tolerably as previously, the only issue was the startup time for the Zen device, but this is to be expected with that device as scores of forum contributions will attest (headfi, etc).
There have been no changes in my networking environment recently.
The only insight I’ve been able to glean is that Roon is overusing the CPU on my NAS. When I check, I see that when Roon is working, that my NAS’s CPU is in the high 90%. I have tried to mitigate this by using Roon within a container on the ‘docker’ app on my NAS to no benefit.
Dropouts occur all day with the prompt ‘waiting for Roon Core’
AceRimmer
(Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!)
8
Unless you have upped the ram that in it’s own makes the ds418 play woefully underspecified to successfully run Roon.
Standard is just 2gb ram.
How many tracks in your library total includes local and streaming services?
It could be it was borderline but as you have added more albums it could have pushed it over the edge.
But as you have still not given us much details of your setup it’s all still guesswork.
AceRimmer
(Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!)
10
Good to hear that!
8gb ram should be more than adequate for 28k tracks I would agree.
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AceRimmer
(Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!)
11
This appears to be the crux of the problem, what is causing the Roon core to disappear from view?
I strongly suspect some type of network issue even though you did say it is hard wired to the router.
The CPU utilization to me is suspiciously high. I’ve even removed processes from my NAS that I don’t use much to better dedicate it to Roon when Roon is in use. This has not helped.
The NAS is now about 3.5 years old now, I wonder if it’s getting less able to handle hungry processes like Roon.
Starting to wonder if I should just get a new core like a NUC or something
Are you applying any DSP in Roon? What does it show for processing speed when playing?
Have you tried uninstalling and then reinstalling Roon package?
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AceRimmer
(Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!)
15
Even if processing speed was low ( below 1.0) I would not expect an error message of “waiting for Roon Core”.
Not entirely sure the very high CPU usage would account for that either as my work laptop is very often chewing up 100% CPU usage and Roon still plays just fine on it with zero dropout.
Only if the hotel WiFi is weak and I’m streaming hires do I get dropouts but that’s not because of " waiting for Roon core".
I had occasional dropouts - particularly with hi-res music - when I was running Roon Core on a 10 year old i7 Windows PC. I moved Roon to ROCK on a NUC 8i7 and haven’t had any dropouts since and the NUC is incredibly stable…
Most likely, but I did see that when I was playing DSD256 files with DSP enabled (so DSD->PCM->DSD) from my Synology (a faster bigger model at that) it would not only peg the CPU but also max out any available RAM as well. Dropouts galore, then playback stops. Didn’t see it killing the core completely, and OP may not be doing anything as heavy, but it’s a possibility, if DSM runs out of memory completely…
Ben with the support team here - my apologies for the delay in getting to your thread!
I wanted to check in and get a status update since some time has passed. Are you still running into connectivity issues? As a good next step, if you could please hardwire your core directly to your router, bypassing any network gear in between, I’d be curious to see how things run.
If you do experience additional drop outs after doing the above, please take note of the date and time, and share that information here. Thanks!
