Playback skipping at the start of tracks (ref#D8UAL0)

Support
1

Hi! What’s not quite right with Roon?

· None of the above quite fits

None of the above quite fits

· None of these quite match

Tell us what's going on

· Time and time again: the start of the track is skipped

Tell us about your home network

· The server is connected via Ethernet, the boxes via Wifi

I hadn’t used Roon much for a while, so I hadn’t had any problems with this brilliant piece of software. Now things have changed, and the old problem has immediately resurfaced: at some point, Roon decides that I don’t need to hear the beginning of a track and simply starts playing a little later. Or it decides that a track is unnecessary altogether and skips it without further ado. The problem isn’t reproducible. Once it’s happened and I jump back to the same point, it usually carries on without a hitch until the phenomenon occurs at another point.

Is there any hope that this problem will ever be resolved? I don’t think it’s really too much to ask that I expect software, which after all costs a fair bit of money, to work without a hitch and not just now and then when I’m lucky. (I also don’t think it’s too much to ask that I want to use Roon primarily as a tool for listening to music, rather than wasting my time speculating about possible causes and fiddling around with potential solutions that usually come to nothing.)

EDIT: Now for something new: I can’t use Roon at all anymore. When I click on a track, it does show that it’s playing (the little flickering icon next to the title), but nothing actually plays. After a while, a message appears saying that Roon has lost connection to the device. Or sometimes it doesn’t. It’s impossible to predict. In any case, nothing plays at all. In other words: I can no longer listen to music, at least not with Roon. (As is so often the case.)

Is there anything I can do? (I don’t want to look for other software, because that’s too much hassle and just leads to other problems. I just want to listen to music.)

2

Hi @Werner_Hintze, the symptoms you’re describing point to a playback path or network stability issue rather than a simple track-specific problem.

Since you’re now seeing playback start but no audio, along with the occasional device connection loss, the first thing we should check is the network path between Roon Server and the playback device. Our Networking Best Practices article covers the setup we recommend for reliable Roon playback, including wired vs. WiFi placement and where connection issues tend to show up.

In the meantime, please try these two things:

  1. Restart the playback device and Roon Server, then try the same track again.
  2. If possible, temporarily connect the playback device by Ethernet instead of WiFi, or move it as close as practical to the access point to see whether the connection loss and skipped starts change.
If you can also note the exact local time + date + track the next skip or disconnect happens and let us know, we will enable diagnostics and can review that window from our side.