· Playback often stutters then fails on first attempt per track, saying "an audio file is loading slowly". This typically occurs at 9-12 seconds in. This starts happening a few tracks in on an album / Roon radio. The track plays fine if I retry it, but I can't simply put on music and let it play because I'll only hear the start of most tracks unless I manually intervene.
The Roon server is a Windows PC which is low spec (N3700, 8GB) but not running anything else and works fine with local playback and other network playback devices. The library (33k tracks, 1TB) is split across two dedicated local SATA SSDs. The playback device is a Bluesound Node (N100). I have a fair bit of DSP enabled, but it's showing about 9-11x processing speed.
Once I've restarted a track, it always plays the whole way through successfully, even long tracks (>15 mins). So it feels like either Roon is not preloading enough of the upcoming file before the track change, or new tracks involve some extra work/transfer.
I'll add that a brief pause to rebuffer would be annoying enough, but the actual behaviour is skipping the track entirely, which is far worse. I don't believe I've ever had any error due to a particular track, so I'd love if you could allow track skipping on error to be disabled - I suppose that's a separate feature request.
Tell us about your home network
· TP Link Archer AXE75 TP Link TL-WA855RE Wi-Fi to ethernet for Bluesound Node TP Link LS10008G switch between router and Roon server
Thanks for the detailed write-up - they made this straightforward to diagnose.
The culprit is your TP-Link TL-WA855RE Wi-Fi extender, not Roon, the Node, or your DSP settings.
The extender operates in repeater mode, which means every packet travels the Wi-Fi channel twice - once from your router to the extender, once again to the Node. This reliably produces burst latency spikes. In your logs we can see the round-trip time to the Node jumping from a normal ~1 ms to anywhere between 30 ms and 231 ms, on every single listening session going back to at least June 10th.
Here’s why the timing matches your symptoms so precisely: when a track changes, Roon tears down the audio stream and rebuilds it from scratch. The Node starts with an empty buffer and begins playing once 2 seconds of audio have arrived. If the extender stalls the connection during those first 10 seconds - while the rest of the buffer is still filling - there’s nothing left to play. Roon reports “audio file is loading slowly” and skips the track. When you retry, the congestion event has typically cleared, which is why it always plays fine the second time.
The fix is to remove the extender from the Node’s network path:
Best fix: Run an Ethernet cable from your switch or router to the Node. Even a flat cable solves this permanently.
Good alternative: Replace the TL-WA855RE with a mesh node (e.g. TP-Link Deco, Eero, or similar) that uses a dedicated backhaul band. Unlike a repeater, these don’t halve their own bandwidth.
Before you buy anything: Move the Node temporarily close enough to connect directly to the AXE75’s Wi-Fi (bypassing the extender entirely). If it plays through an album without skipping, you’ve confirmed the extender is the sole cause.
Your DSP setup — the convolution filter, upsampling to 96 kHz, and the EQ — is running fine at 3–9× processing speed. No changes needed there.
Let us know how it goes after bypassing the extender.
Just checking in on this. Were you able to try bypassing the TP-Link TL-WA855RE extender, either by moving the Node close enough to connect directly to the AXE75 Wi-Fi or by wiring it to the router or switch? If you tested it and the track skipping stopped, that would confirm the extender is the issue, and we’d know the DSP settings are still fine. Let us know what you found, thanks.
Hi noris, it seems the problem may have been server performance after all. I got the error and a skip towards the end of a track on the setup in question, then started getting occasional 10-seconds-in track skips on my desktop computer (wired to the same switch as the server) and even directly playing from the server itself. Having encountered the problems on every playback device, the issue clearly has to be the server.
I think the heat was getting to the poor little cpu and causing moments of severe throttling. The Node setup has much more DSP, so it gets caught out more easily and hence the first place to notice the problem. Now my local heat wave has passed it’s doing a lot better. I suspect if I upgrade to a case with better airflow that’ll solve this for me.
I would still like to disable track skipping on error. It’s even more annoying when it’s late in the track and I have to rewind and scrub around to find where I was.
Thanks for the update and for tracking this down yourself - thermal throttling on the CPU is a classic cause of exactly this pattern, and it explains why the wired desktop was also affected once the heat really set in.
Regarding disabling track skipping on error: unfortunately Roon does not have a setting to suppress this behavior - when the audio engine reports a failure, Roon automatically advances to the next track. There is no way to change this at the moment.
For the thermal issue, two things worth trying before buying a new case: reapplying fresh thermal paste on the CPU (the original paste dries out and loses conductivity over time, especially on a machine that runs 24/7) and cleaning any dust from the heatsink and fans. These two steps alone often bring temperatures down significantly and can be done without replacing the case.