Pauses of 10-20 seconds when skipping tracks

Support
1

Hello,

I am sometimes experiencing pauses of up to 10 seconds when skipping tracks in Roon. My current setup is included below, but I have been experiencing a similar issue with other setups as well. When the track changes naturally at the end of the last song, I don’t experience this issue.

Is this expected behaviour, or can I do something to eliminate this?

Thanks,

Nick

  • Huawei 5G Router to Mac Mini 2018 (Chord Shawline Ethernet Cable)
  • Mac Mini 2018 (local audio files on external Sandisk SSD - 1050 Mbps read speed) to English Electric 8switch Ethernet Switch (Chord Shawline Ethernet Cable)
  • English Electric 8switch Ethernet Switch to Allo Digione Signature Player With Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Rev 1.1/Ropieee XL (Chord Shawline Ethernet Cable)
  • Allo Digione Signature Player to Chord Hugo TT2 DAC (Chord Signature Super ARAY streaming cable - BNC)
2

What is your network equipment manufacturer and models.

3

@ged_hickman1. I have added more details of my network setup.

4

FWIW, I’ve been having something similar that I’m chasing.

For me, turning off the “auto-optimize” feature of my Unifi networking gear seems to have reduced the frequency with which I get a long delay at the beginning of a track, but it still does happen. I’m working on cleaning up my library so I can run the suggested test on backing up the database and trying fresh. No idea if you’re facing similar issues, but this may elicit some ideas:

6

Hi @nickharambee,

If you play to System Output of the Mac Core machine do you see the same behavior?

7

Hi Dylan,

In addition to this issue of the pauses when skipping tracks I was also experiencing issues with drop outs on a Chord Poly/Mojo, so thought I’d invest in a set of Deco M9 plus units to set up a WiFi mesh network. I thought it might help with both issues, but while it fixed the issue with the Chord Mojo/Poly (I can now walk around my apartment without dropouts), it hasn’t made a difference to the pausing issue. So I am supposing that this issue is not due to the local network speeds (especially given that I have the issue with a wired ethernet connection as well).

To answer your question I am not really seeing the issue when I play to the System Output of the Mac core (Mac mini 2018) - maybe just a very occasional delay of 1-2 seconds.

But for all my other devices, listed below, I see the 10-20 second issue, both for local files and when streaming from Qobuz and Tidal (my typical internet connection speed is around 150-200 Mbps):

  • Allo Digione Signature Player (RoPieee XL) connected to core via Gigabit Ethernet cables/switch.
  • MacBook Pro connected to WiFi mesh network 5 Ghz (Deco M9 Plus).
  • Chord Poly connected to WiFi mesh network 2.4 Ghz (Deco M9 Plus).
    (typical transfer speeds on local network are 300 Mbps)

An additional issue I have noticed, which may be related, is that when using a Roon Remote on Mac or iOS the tag window can be slow to populate with my tags when I open it. See screenshot below of an empty tag list (which is usually very full!) - sometimes it takes up to 10 seconds to populate.

Screenshot 2021-01-08 at 10.57.13
Screenshot 2021-01-08 at 10.57.13904×1690 51 KB

With Best Wishes,

Nick

8

Hey @nickharambee, and thanks for the update! Could you please reproduce the issue one more time and reply here with a timestamp (the date and time you encounter the issue) as well as the name of the track you’re playing at the time so I can enable diagnostics for your account?

9

Hi @nuwriy

At around 11.11 GMT Weds 13 Jan I skipped this track:

Kountie Gkalia - Cheb Raba El Maghnaoui (Maghreb K7 Club…)

to this track:

Epistrophy - Thelonious Monk (Palo Alto)

Here there was a pause in the sound of around a minute, which is longer than usual (typically pauses are 10-20 seconds, when they happen). I was using the wired connection to an Allo Digione Signature Player.

With Best Wishes,

Nick

10

You can also look at my listening yesterday evening (around 22.00 GMT) or this evening (20.25 GMT). I am now experiencing pauses of up to 5 minutes between tracks. This is of course very frustrating. What is also frustrating is the delay in response from the support team. Please can you reply promptly to my messages. I have just bought a lifetime licence and my experience of using the Roon software has been very poor over the last couple of weeks and it’s getting worse by the day.

11

Hello @nickharambee, I have enabled diagnostics on your account so our technical staff can get some more insight into what’s going on here. The next time your Core is active a diagnostics report will automatically be generated and uploaded directly to our servers

Once that’s been received, I’ll be sure to update this thread and pass the diagnostics over to the team for further analysis.

12

@nuwriy - 6 days and I still haven’t heard anything from you. Why is this? You should have received a diagnostics report 6 days ago because I am trying to use Roon every day. But it is often practically unusable. To put this in context, I have used a combination of iTunes, JRiver Media Centre, Qobuz, Tidal and Spotify for the last 20 years, and I have never experienced issues with playback and never had to rebuild any database. Since switching to Roon a year ago, I have had to rebuild my database twice, once because it (and the backups) became corrupted, on one occasion losing months of work on my library, and now I am in this situation where there are significant gaps between songs (sometimes as long a 2/3 minutes) and sometimes tracks are not playing at all.

I have upgraded all components of my system, including switches, ethernet cables, hifi components, WiFi mesh network, fast solid state hard drives, etc., in order to eliminate any possible issues with these, but still Roon doesn’t work.

Unless this matter can be resolved in the coming days, I will have no option but to request a refund of my lifetime licence, as I simply don’t have the time to waste on trying to get something as simple as playing tracks working.

I hope you can understand my situation and my frustration. At the moment I can only conclude that, despite many happy customers, Roon is not a finished product, is therefore not fit for purpose, and customer support is too slow. If you want to use one application to manage your music library on a regular basis, and to pay for the best software to do so, customer support really needs to be more responsive.

I really don’t want to be writing this message, as I was hoping that Roon would work and would be the future hub of my music listening, but there you go…

With Best Wishes,

Nick

14

Hello @nickharambee, and my apologies for the delayed response. I have been out of the office a few days this week but the QA team was able to take a look at the information we sent over and it has since been assigned to a member of the QA team for investigation.

I’d like to collect more information to assist the team further. Could you please send me a screenshot of the signal path when you’re attempting playback to one of the issue endpoints? Also, do you see this issue if you connect your core to a Wi-Fi hotspot?

15

@nuwriy. Here is one example of the signal path. But I also experience the issue with all signal paths (including to a Chord Poly/Mojo combination), with the possible exception of playing to the standard audio output on the Mac Mini (last time I couldn’t reproduce the issue there).

Screenshot 2021-01-22 at 16.27.21
Screenshot 2021-01-22 at 16.27.21770×988 79.6 KB

I also experience the issue when the core is connected to WiFi rather than ethernet.

16

Hello @nickharambee, and thanks for sharing that! I’ve added it to our investigation with the QA team and should hear back from them with the next steps shortly.

17

@nuriwy. Another week has passed and nothing. Could you please let me know what’s going on.

18

Hello @nickharambee, my apologies for the wait on this issue. I asked the QA team for their questions and the following would assist their investigation:

  1. What’s the current size of your queue? Does it help if you clear it? I’d recommend making a backup before doing this test.
  2. We’re only seeing streamed content being played in the logs, if you use only local content, does this still occur?
19

I rarely have much of a queue. No queue at present.

At the moment I am mostly streaming, but I experience the same issue with local files. I have already mentioned this some time ago. Are you reading my posts in full?

20

@nuwriy . @dylan. I am incredibly frustrated by the slow response of your team. I am unaccustomed to such a slow response for paid software - this is very poor customer service. I raised this issue 7 weeks ago, and we are no further forward. It also seems that you are not properly reading my posts. I have recently paid for a lifetime licence, and I would now like a refund. Clearly Roon isn’t fit for purpose. The slow response of the library/software has plagued me most of the time I have been using Roon (even though I am using fast SSD drives/high end equipment, mesh WiFi network, etc.). As mentioned above, I have had to recreate my database three times already. I am not prepared to do so again, and to lose the work that I have put into it. Clearly I have been naive in thinking that the issues I have been experiencing can be addressed.

With Best Wishes,

Nick Putman

21

Hi Nick I feel your pain, believe me but my advice would be to try and bear with them until they can help.
I am in a similar situation to you , currently more or less being ignored on a support issue I have , I think it is because of the new launch,I am assuming a lot of the support guys are tied up with this. Its not satisfactory I agree.
I was close to posting something about the lack of support too, but where would I go if I get rid of Roon? For me it would be cutting my nose off to spite my face.

I am hoping Roon 1.8 is a more pleasurable experience for me and my issues are less. Hang in there is my advice

22

10 more days have passed and no update. I can only conclude that you are not actually investigating this issue. Please read my last post and respond.

And before you ask, the 1.8 update has made no difference to this issue. Just waited 2 minutes for a track to change.