Either take Martin up on his suggestion regarding re-opening your previous support request, or post a new one. Either way, it would be worth adding the info requested when you first create a support topic, i.e.
Roon Core Machine
Networking Gear & Setup Details
Connected Audio Devices
Number of Tracks in Library
Description of Issue
The problems you’ve described sound very much like a networking issue, but in the absence of specific details regarding your system it’s difficult to offer any advice.
I feel like its mostly your network. It’s hard to predict when these problems happen - they are very timing dependent. What does your network look like?
As a means of troubleshooting: Check your Mac’s power settings and be sure the Mac, the hard drives, and the display are not sleeping and see if this resolves the issue.
Sorry, saw your post too late, after I have answered already, in part, to hacker 19.
Additional specifications: Audio Device is Matrix mini-3 pro, 2500 tracks in library.
Hope that helps
It might also be worth searching the forum for any other relevant posts. To find the above I googled “Fritz Cable Box roon problems uh oh somethings not right”. There may well be other threads that could help.
The FRITZ OS 7 update includes a feature called “Software Packet Acceleration” that can cause issues with remote connectivity. We recommend disabling this setting from the FRITZ GUI.
Good luck. This stuff is frustrating. I had two periods of about 1 month each in the last 4 years where my Roon was frustratingly non-functional or at least intermittent enough that I was annoyed a lot of the time. My wife noticed. Rest of the time it’s been grand. But nothing anyone could have said during those 1-month not-so-great periods would have been helpful other than fixing the situation. Wish I could help, hope this works. In my experience, it usually is networking.
I agree that it’s a good idea that the OP turns this off for testing. However …
FWIW, the feature is named differently on my Fritzbox with current firmware 7.29. Below are the default settings, using Vodafone, and they are not causing any remote connectivity issues for me.
According to what I read, hardware acceleration is always on after a reboot (at least on Vodafone), but I haven’t tested it. The performance is said to suffer considerably without it.
These settings are quite hidden in the configuration and if Roon’s “best practices” KB is still accurate, it should say where to find the settings and refer to the correct name.
This older post (Fritzbox OS 7.21) about a skipping issue describes where to find it and says to disable “hardware” as well as “layer 2”, and that it will be back on after reboot. It also confirms a performance hit:
I question if this is really (still) necessary in all networks:
No issues for me ever with 2 different Fritzboxes. (Given how common Fritzboxes are, I would guess that I am not the only one)
As the post also says, performance drops a lot.
According to technical details, the feature does not seem nefarious and if Roon has a problem with it, maybe Roon can fix it or work with AVM to get it fixed by them. It’s a very common router brand and users finding the info in the Roon KB and changing the settings after every router reboot can probably not be relied on.
EDIT: Shortly after the above linked post in the same thread:
In Germany LAN in colloquial language refers to wired connections and Wifi to non-wired connections. “Ethernet” is not a common (colloquial) term in Germany; way to technical.
I can confirm this- doing a without- / with - package acceleration speed test showed a 88% speed loss ( the low speed performance was checked twice). Makes me wonder how that can solve the problem described in the OP.
Theoretically it’s possible I suppose. As I understand it, the features work by the router keeping a table of endpoints and traffic, so that each network packet does not have to traverse the whole TCP/IP stack up and down, and instead the router can take shortcuts because it knows who is who and which packet should go where.
If this table gets messed up or does not work correctly with certain types of traffic, packets may not be delivered as needed and it’s conceivable that turning this off (and forcing standards-based behavior) improves this, as long as the overall throughput and latency is still fast enough. (And 45 Mbits still is for audio data).
In this case, I wonder why it would possibly affect some people and others not. My initial guess would be that more complex networks (maybe managed switches) might be more susceptible to this. It doesn’t seem to cause an issue for me, as mentioned, but I have a simple network with one router, one unmanaged switch, and some wired and wifi endpoints - that’s it. Or maybe it was really fixed in later Fritzbox updates as it may seem from the older posts.
Can you say yet if it affected the original problem for you, apart from lowering the speed?
Too early for a definite statement, but so far Roon Core started either way without delay when I checked with package acceleration on/off. Will keep it off for further observation (56 Mbit/s seems good enough for Roon Core and my other tasks in the network).
Here in the US, “ethernet” is only used by technical people. User interfaces and product manuals usually refer to “wired” or “wireless” network connections.
“wifi” is actually quite uncommon in Germany, it’s typically WLAN (Wireless LAN) and LAN for wired, which kind of makes sense (except that WLAN could be Wired LAN just as well )
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