Playlist additions not downloading to Iphone 12

Windows 10 machine, i7 with 16GB ram
Music stored on western Digital MyCloud PR4100 with 40TB storage
All software is current

Only using iphone 12 on wifi when close to server and offline when out and about
All software is current

About 4000 tracks in library

Tested ARC by creating a playlist of 10 songs on server (core) and downloaded to iphone.
All flac hi-res files, all local. All good.
Then, added 15 more local songs to playlist on server and waited for iphone to update and download.
Nothing… iphone just sat there. Display showed new content was downloading but after 1 hour, no new songs appeared on my iphone and showed ‘unavailable’ in Offline mode.
Also, while waiting to download, phone got VERY hot to the point of me turning off phone to cool.
I deleted downloaded files from iphone and repeated. Initial download was fine but any new additions updated on Playlist on server do not download/sync to iphone.
I am usually in Offline mode and using Carplay therefore I download all that I listen to onto iphone.
Some Playlists are 500 songs deep and largest is 65GB in size.

Hi @JDizzy,

Thank you for the report. The tech support is investigating your diagnostics, and we have a few clarifying questions that should help us pinpoint what’s wrong here:

  1. Does ARC freeze or become unresponsive when you attempt to download these tracks, or does the download progress simply never proceed?
  1. There were two classes of warnings during attempts to download content to ARC in recent log history. The first class of warnings pertained to connectivity failures; the phone was transitioning constantly between connectivity states and repeatedly failed to download items due to poor or failed connection. I assume some of these warnings have to do with you testing “offline” mode on the phone, but others are less obviously purposeful and might indicate an underpinning network problem.
  • Do you have a VPN on your phone or home network?
  • Were you outside the home (ie. cellular) when you last attempted to download local files?
  • Do you have any issues with port forwarding?
  1. The other class of warnings suggests the phone is struggling with low memory. ARC’s repeated attempts to download tracks were rejected by low disk availability warnings from iOS.
  • Do you have additional apps running that draw huge RAM loads?
  • Is this phone low on storage capacity?

4000 tracks shouldn’t nearly be enough for the database sync itself (without downloads) to cause poor performance in ARC the phone unless there are other factors at play. Unless the phone is nearly out of storage/memory or had little to no connection or had almost no connection, ARC shouldn’t tax the device enough to cause the heat you’re reporting. There’s a chance something is going wrong and we’ll investigate accordingly.

The team will investigate more thoroughly with development once we know a little bit more about your network and connectivity situation. Please answer the questions above at your convenience and we’re be standing by.

  1. Does ARC freeze or become unresponsive when you attempt to download these tracks, or does the download progress simply never proceed?

Yes, at times it is unresponsive (or screen is frozen), but will eventually start working again.
I got in a bind where server said there were 622 songs in a playlist I was downloading via ARC but ARC reported it was downloading xxx of 623. It never finished and got stuck on the last file (that existed, or didn’t exist). This made it so I could not download anything else (other playlists). I eventually deleted the download and am downloading it again. I also deleted a few files from the playlist in hopes it would fix it. It now says it is downloading xxx of 621 files and Roon database reports 622 files in playlist. We shall see where it goes this time.

  • Do you have a VPN on your phone or home network?
    No, I don’t believe so.

  • Were you outside the home (ie. cellular) when you last attempted to download local files?
    No, I have it set to only download via wifi.

  • Do you have any issues with port forwarding?
    Yes, I do not access network outside my local wifi range

  • Do you have additional apps running that draw huge RAM loads?
    No, nothing running on phone that I am aware of.

  • Is this phone low on storage capacity?
    Should not be. I monitor available disk space during the process.

I really want to continue using ARC just for my downloaded/portable music and will continue trying to wrap my head around how to make it work in it’s current state. The actual server end of Roon is very fast and I am learning where and how to manipulate the metadata, etc.
I do not foresee using the port forward method as most times, there is no internet and many times no phone service.

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Thank you for providing such precise detail @JDizzy. The team is syncing on this issue again today and we’ll follow up with our next troubleshooting steps shortly. If the phone has storage capacity and RAM to do so, downloading playlists on the local network shouldn’t be a problem. In any case, the freezing and hanging are not something you should encounter in the app, and certainly not in the circumstances you’re describing.

We’ll circle back as soon as the team has delved deeper. Please leave your Core online for several hours, if possible, so more recent diagnostic reports can reach our server.

Hi @JDizzy,

The team has probed diagnostic logging further and uncovered a few additional traces suggesting what might be going wrong.

Firstly, there’s evidence a recent Core migration might be causing sync failures between ARC and Roon. I notice you recently spun up an EarlyAccess Core after several days of RoonServer; however, it also appears that you transitioned from a Windows all-in-one Core to RoonServer. Regarding this issue, we have two points of follow-up:

  1. The team is investigating a known issue around Core migration affecting ARC that is likely affecting this situation. I recommend creating a Backup of Roon before refreshing your Roon database on your current EarlyAccess Core:
  • Create a Backup of your current database
  • Exit out of Roon
  • Navigate to your Roon Database Location
  • Find the folder that says “Roon”
  • Rename the “Roon” folder to “Roon_old”
  • Reinstall the Roon App from our Downloads Page to generate a new Roon folder
  • Verify if the issue persists on a fresh database before restoring the backup
  1. Additionally, reinstalling ARC should prompt the app to delete any cached authentication settings associated with your previous RoonServer or all-in-one Core. Be sure to delete the app data fully; while this will, unfortunately, delete any playlists you have already successfully downloaded, it should refresh conditions and possibly will possibly resolve the issue.

Lastly, there are some warnings associated with your external storage device in your Core logs. Have you had any issues with external storage, or any difficulty playing local files within Roon itself? If the Core can’t access the partitioned disk properly, local files can’t upload from your Core to ARC for download.

We’ll keep a lookout for your response, as always, and we’ll follow up from there.

Yes, I was confused (and food for thought) about which version of server I should (or was) using.
There is the ‘all in one’ install which I initially installed, and the the one called ‘roon server’ which I thought was the same which I installed on top. After which (trying to fix things by using beta, installed beta version (which was same build as the one I originally installed). Yikes! No wonder things went sideways.
For the moment, after deleting ARC from phone yesterday due to sync problem, reinstalling and downloading 600+ file playlist again, things seem to have stabilized. I am working on another playlist at the moment and will download that to phone also. IF, things start getting sketchy again, I will follow above instructions and take it from there.
For the moment I am good and hope to see updates to ARC as time passes… passing artwork to Carplay would be a nice start. :grinning:… thanks for your tinkering!

I had my files on a 40TB NAS and noticed it was a bit slow at serving up the files.
I have since put Roon server on i5 Windows 10 machine with a 500 GB SSD and a 2TB USB external in an attempt to alleviate any problems on my side.

Thanks again!

Hey @JDizzy,

How is ARC performing on the most recent build we released yesterday? It included a number of fixes that should resolve some of the warnings previously shown in ARC diagnostics.

Hopefully, playback, browsing, and playlist additions are all stable! We’ll keep a lookout for your response.

Not sure if I got the update:
Roon ARC shows 1.0.9 (build 139)
and the core is 2.0 (build 1203)

Everything seems to work satisfactory as is but I can’t ‘play rough’ with it.
For instance,
I had existing playlist built within Roon and downloaded files to iphone.
Later, I did some editing of playlist on server adding files. I believe as I was editing, ARC started updating but showed the wrong total number of files in playlist. I gave it a while and then went to Offline mode to see if all had downloaded. I found when connected to server, the correct number of files in playlist shows and titles are present. But, in offline mode, some of the recently added files show as unavailable. ARC showed that everything was downloaded but not so. I went back and deleted titles not available from playlist on server, let ARC update to new number of files, re-added the files back to playlist and they downloaded.
From this point forward, I will put ARC in offline mode before doing any additions to playlists. Doing it this way, seemed to work correctly and everything updated correctly via ARC when connecting to server again.

At the moment, I am trying to export M3U playlist from Roon for use with another player.
No cigar… I don’t understand why something so basic is not an option without jumping through many hoops… xls files, etc. Yucky

@connor
Just wondering if there is a way to tell ARC to refresh info from server, ie playlist additions etc.
It seems my iphone gets stuck trying to download to it.
The playlist is showing same number of songs as server but also shows it is downloading but never advances to next song. Right now it is stuck downloading 909 of 914 tracks.
Last night I was doing work on server database adding songs to new playlist and when opening ARC on phone, it went to a black screen. I waited a while then rebooted my phone and it got stuck on apple logo then went into diagnostics mode (scary, as if it was bricked), it then gave me a message ARC had crashed, rebooted and everything seems back to normal. But ARC is not updating downloads. Is there a simple way to cancel download (or let ARC and roon sync to stop showing it is downloading?)

Hi @JDizzy,

Apologies for the lapse here. How has ARC been performing on the more recent builds?