Roon 2.0 and ARC issues
This is feedback. This is not criticism, and this is not a bunch of feature requests or suggestions. This is just my journey to ARC build 64/74, with a lot of context provided just to emphasize what I happened to find useful, tedious, etc. This will be LONG!
At the end of this long story, you’ll have learned that
- ARC build 74 on Android is far superior to build 74 (it’s a long story, I warned you)
- Roon silently drops Tidal albums from the library
- not all Roon Remotes were created equal
- Roon still provides tremendous value to me
And before starting, a couple of additional disclaimers
- whatever looks like a Roon issue is likely a user error
- I’m not complaining
- I’m not looking for a discussion
- I don’t intend to help anybody (other than as a warning sign)
- I don’t want to be rude, just trying to manage expectations
- if anybody happens to find this helpful, great!
And before starting, some tidbits about my environment
- Roon Core started in August, 2020
- Roon Core runs on i5/16G Linux (old HW, too low spec)
- Roon Remote is 99% time an old Android tablet (that I keep rotating around)
- Roon Desktop was on an old Win7
- Roon Desktop is now a Mac M1 Mini
- Roon ARC runs on Pixel 3a Android 12 phone
- library has about 4800 albums, 61,000 tracks
- some 13,000 mp3 tracks from owned CDs (mostly duplicates)
- Tidal as a streaming service back end
Every track that I end up playing regularly is first listened, tagged, and liked. But to be able to track my progress through the library and anything that is opportunistically added to it, I need to be able to tell if I’ve actually listened to it and evaluated it (and not just played it). Based on that albums may be removed from the library (or tagged and potentially liked).
Unfortunately, due to the way Roon overloads the heart icon to represent three different states, I can not use that because
- I can not focus on not-liked tracks
- I can not use it to separate between unevaluated and evaluated but non-liked tracks
So, I need to use a tag just to track the things that the heart icon was almost meant to track. Of course, for me it is also important to know which tracks I’ve liked.
So, for the past two years I’ve been going through my library track by track, just listening, tagging, and liking them. However, in May 2022 I noticed that some of my favorite albums were missing from my library without me removing them. After looking into it a bit more, I realized that there were even more albums missing.
Luckily, I had a test export of all my albums from early 2021 to which I could try to compare to, if I just had a reasonable way of doing so. I converted my old and new album lists from the exported XLSX to CSV, and did a quick comparison, which showed LOTS of changes. So, I ended up writing a shell script that takes two CSV files, extracts the album data from each, pushes the contents to two tables in a SQLite database, and then does a simple comparison based on artist/album name.
Obviously, this was a rough comparison, but it was convenient enough for getting a candidate list of potentially missing albums I could check on. And it showed some 250 albums missing from my library, with about another 100 false positives (stuff like album name getting “(Remastered)” or similar added to it)!
If I had already listened to all those missing albums fully, that would have meant about 250 hours of extra listening, just to evaluate each track, again. But as it turned out, some of the missing albums were really gone, and I only ended up adding some 220 albums back into the library. Furthermore, I also had some old track exports, so I could at least get the tags of the “new” tracks that I had already checked. A major disappointment was realizing that the exported track listing did not have the heart icon data included, at all.
Ever since then, I’ve exported all albums, all tracks, and liked tracks on a regular basis. Typically I export albums on a weekly basis (every 7-10 days), which shows about 2-5 albums disappearing since the previous check. I re-add the albums back to the library, go through older track exports to find known tags, and known likes, which is pretty tedious stuff. Each album is added with all track play counts as zero, as if the album had never been seen or played before, but at least I am able to restore most of the important stuff (to me). Eventually, this should become trivial, as I will have listened and tagged all of them, so adding them back will only lose play counts (I am using the previously played, which will get messed up).
There is also an added bonus disappointment: as Roon only allows me to like artists whose tracks I have in my library. If all their albums disappear at the same time, then I’ll also lose the artist Like, which I therefore need to check for each artist that is affected by these silently disappearing albums. So far, I’ve not needed to refer to any backup information for that.
As anyone can guess, this is relatively tedious work, and I’ve now been doing it for about six months. It would be great if
- album listings could be exported automatically (from backups)
- track listings could be exported automatically (from backups)
- exported listings contained the heart icon information
- if the library kept the information about the albums and tracks even when they disappear
- if Roon Remote on Android would also be capable of exporting
Of course, it would be great if the albums did not silently disappear from my library at all!
Now we come to late September when Roon announced 2.0 and ARC. ARC was something that I had waited for all of my 2 years of enjoying Roon. Unfortunately, 2.0 was also dropping support for the older Windows versions of Roon Desktop, which meant that I would no longer have a working Roon client capable of exporting albums and tracks. So, I decided I’d stay behind with 1.8 until I knew what the ARC experience would be like for those who moved to using it.
I also needed to decide on what my path to 2.0 would eventually be. I would need to purchase either a Win 10/11 capable system or some Apple product that was known to have the album/track exporting feature. Since it seemed that Apple users had the most complete feature set on Remote/Desktop, I eventually ended up buying a M1 Mini in late October, just for the purpose of exporting Roon library’s albums and tracks. It is a decent book stopper, too!
Now that my road block had been cleared, I was able to upgrade to 2.0 and then test ARC. Wohoo! Using my phone, a VPN tunnel to home, and ARC I was finally able to listen to my library at work, too. The first two weeks were great: ARC connected relatively quickly, and played for 8 hours straight.
Yes, the setup each morning was a bit rough, but worth it:
- start VPN over mobile
- open Roon Remote to focus on stuff (since the bookmarks are in the landscape mode and the Android Remote does not do landscape on my phone, I need to focus manually each time)
- save the focused tracks to a new playlist
- close Remote
- open ARC
- go to the playlist and start shuffle
- enjoy
Then, I upgraded to ARC build 74. This is what that setup has been for the ARC the past three weeks (has it really been that long?):
- do the VPN/Remote stuff as usual
- open ARC
- wait until it times out and says “Poor connection, retry”
- press Retry and wait for 3-5 seconds for it to properly sync
- go to Playlists
- notice that the new playlist does not show up
- go to Home screen, and then back to Playlists
- start a shuffle on the playlist
- enjoy about 30-90 minutes
- notice that the ARC app has died
- start it again (no problem there)
- notice that it shows being in a middle of a song that played some time ago
- skip forward 3-6 tracks to get to where it was when it died
- hit play
- listen to music for roughly 30-90 minutes
- go back to “ARC app died”
Having to restart the app 1-2 times per hour turned out to be not that motivating, and I started to not care. That is, until yesterday evening (Nov 28th), when I decided to see if it really was the new build or some other change in my environment. Since I had just done the dance with Tidal’s app (they dropped support for bit perfect play on Android in 2.72, but still had it in 2.71.2, so I had downgraded Tidal to get that back), I figured I could try to downgradeARC, too (not recommended). However, what ended up happening was that I managed to misread the current build version as 84, and so ended up downgrading to build 74 (so, in reality just re-installing).
Today (Nov 29th) was the first day at the office with the “downgraded” ARC build 74. Connected at first try (no retry), showed the new playlist under Playlists with 0 fudging (but too early to call as this was the first proper connect), and started playing without any issues. After about 2.5 hours, the play stopped but the app was still alive and it had simply paused (for whatever reason). Simply pressed Play, and it continued without issue. After five (5) hours of continuous play, I stopped and called the “downgrade” a success. (As a side note, the previous ARC install seemed to be running the phone quite hot, but this time around it was running cool, as usual).
So, I don’t really know. My experiences from the past five weeks tell me that ever since upgrading to build 74 everything stopped working properly. Me thinking that build 74 was the previous, properly running version left me just re-installing that one, so I guess the upgrade process had somehow hosed the previous build 74 as it was now running just fine. I’m running a stock Android 12, non-rooted, but since it is relatively old, it could have been a HW issue.
Through an unnecessarily complicated process, I ended up fixing a simple ARC issue. I originally intended to report just the success of the downgrade, and how that showed issues with the latest build. Since that was not really the case, I figured I’d give feedback on other issues I’ve had, and provided a cautionary tale on careless downgrades.
If you read this far: thanks!
If you enjoyed: you’re welcome!
If it was a bore: sorry!
I can only hope that this story arc (ha!) has emphasized both my issues with Roon’s quirks, and my (so far) continuing investment into having a rewarding Roon experience. Next on the list of improvements is to upgrade the Core to some decent i7.
If I could wish for two things, they would be
- more love for the Android side of things
- the ability to play 3-5 bookmarked “playlists” (possibly with the Roon/Tidal provided mixes) with pre-defined probabilities
But since this was not meant to be a feature request type thing, the above was just part of my dream in my FANtastical journey through the world of Roon.
–Artsi