I have an idea… it may be easy to test. This is just an idea, and I’m just guessing here. Remember, 99+% of the TIDAL streams in Roon do not have issues with the connection. I’m guessing as to what impacts a handful of users.
Here is my idea:
Roon downloads the TIDAL track into memory for playback when you start playing the track. TIDAL on the other hand will stream with just a tiny buffer because it makes sense to minimize their outbound bandwidth costs for people who hit next or stop in the middle of a track. No point in paying for bandwidth to stream a song you don’t play. This is a side effect of outbound traffic having a cost to them.
Early on, we found that downloading the track in its entirety helps those who have poor or intermittent internet connectivity. The results of doing this were clear, as we saw reliability go up and many users reported the opposite of what you are experiencing: they had unreliable TIDAL app streaming but solid TIDAL streaming in Roon. We all rejoiced!
I’m wondering if this download of the track is causing your ISP or router to behave badly. The test would be to see if you can reliability download large files from TIDAL. It’s hard to do this from TIDAL without writing a custom program, but we can try downloading large files from elsewhere on the internet, and if that fails, we will know that this could be the issue. The answer would be to provide a way for you to turn off this behavior.
When you are having these issues in Roon, using the same machine, using the stock OS web browser (Safari or Edge), can you attempt to download this 2.8gb file:
https://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/ubuntu-releases/21.04/ubuntu-21.04-desktop-amd64.iso
It’s an Ubuntu operating system image, and you can delete it after the fact, but I’m curious if you manage to download a full 2,818,738,176 bytes without issues.
I know it’s a bit annoying of a test, but it’ll help give us data.