I’m a lifetime subscriber of this product and when it’s working it’s a marvelous piece of software that accentuates the positive of my music listening experience.
However, it needs to be said that this software is riddled with bugs, problems, issues. Whatever you want to call it. I’ve been a digital music advocate for decades. I began with the squeeze ecosystem and while Squeeze was a bleeding edge product it never had the inconsistency of Roon.
People in this community have argued that if you’re not prepared to be a tinkerer with the software then Roon really isn’t for you. That’s a cop out. We’re all paying a large amount of money to make use of this product. If it was free I’d say yes to that idea but this is a high end software product.
My Roon system is optimized and it still has problems almost daily-i.e., a track not playing or a playlist that just randomly stops playing or a track that stops playing mid track.
These types of issues just don’t exist with other music streaming platforms.
Roon, please get this software to a place of reliability and consistency for the benefit of your customer base and for your long term survival.
If you have these issues you should post a support request about them.
I’ve posted for several specific issues over the years. I’m referring to the overall reliability of the software.
But many people have none of these issues, so you’ll probably have to be more specific
I’d say the issues you have reported would arise with most, if not all, playback solutions.
Looking back at the issues you have reported it seems the majority was caused by a VLAN setting on a switch, and one where multicast routing wasn’t properly set your router.
Seems a little unfair to point at Roon in those scenarios, don’t you agree?
Anyways, do you still have stability issues? You should report those, take action and remedy.
Aside from the recent Cloudflare debacle my Roon experience has been healty for many years now, over 10 years to be honest!
I did have a vlan switch issue that was easily solved. I’m well versed in networking, computers and the endless issues that arise from wifi.
The instability issues are only in Roon. If I use other streaming services like Qobuz direct, Spotify, Wiim app there are no stability issues. All of those streamers work without hiccup.
Only within Roon server is there instability. And again the instability I’m referring to is Qobuz songs not queuing properly, qobuz songs stopping mid song, Qobuz playlists stopping mid playlist.
This continues into the Roon Arc environment as well where songs will sometimes not load properly or will stop playing mid song.
Appreciate the further information, but it should be reported in the Support section, as the Roon staff can look into your logs to see probable causes. But it also urges you to describe your setup and give the support crew a reasonable chance to assist.
The absolute bulk of all Roon issues reported are networking related, many of them related to mesh networking or missing the IGMP Snooping and Multicast Routing activation settings necessary for Roon (and a few other playback softwares).
Give them a chance, they are very helpful!
I do not disagree with continuing to engage with support to resolve issues. But I strongly disagree with any implication that Roon is perfectly stable just because some posters have not had issues. The fact that Roon has had to implement a window for background metadata processing clearly shows that instead of stabilizing this process, they have had to move it so that it does not interfere with people’s usage.
Roon is highly complex. I can sympathize with why it is so difficult for the developers to resolve all the issues. And I appreciate the implementation of the above work around.
But let’s not jump all over everyone who reports issues.
The point is that because not everyone has these issues in this severity („riddled with bugs, problems, issues“), whatever the OP has is something that can be investigated, pinpointed, and probably fixed one way or another.
@Suedkiez I would lean towards thinking that it’s an addressable issue as well. What I can’t seem to wrap my head around is that only Roon presents problems on a regular cadence. No other music streaming service causes my system to hiccup at all. I’ve gone through all of the documentation of proper networking setup. I’ve isolated potential problems like ipv6, IGMP Snooping and Multicast Routing activation settings. I’ve hard wired my server. I have a mesh wifi system to facilitate consistent wifi. The concern I have is that Roon may never be ready for prime time despite herculean efforts by users like myself to get it to work consistently and that’s not acceptable.
It’s definitely weird and I’m not trying to guess what the cause might be. This needs some deep analysis that Support should be able to deliver.
I was just trying to say that if people (like me) mention that they have no such problems, they are not doing it for bragging rights. It’s just an IMHO valuable data point that indicates some kind of difference, whatever it might be, between your installation and, e.g., mine, considering that I made no efforts whatsoever (beyond the basics) and have a perfectly working system generally speaking (the odd minor Roon bug notwithstanding).
I plugged my Roon Server and some endpoints into the network five and a half years ago, then repeated the same (with a different network configuration) in a new location after a house move last year, and my Roon has been working without any glitches, dropouts, random stoppages, etc., every single day.
So something must be different, and it should be possible to find out.
Roon is the only product using RAAT , it’s an in house protocol. Other players are almost certainly UPnP/DLNA .
Roon deliberately uses a very small buffer in order to sync zones when grouped . Other players probably hide network deficiencies by using a big buffer. JRiver for example allows you to preload (if you wish) a whole ALBUM into memory before playback starts !!
With Roon KISS definitely works, anything fancy is likely to trip up Roon.
I know you don’t want to know but I have been using Roon for nearly 10 yrs without any technical glitches that I can recall. Maybe you are using Roon in a different way than I am
This forum is the sole access to Roon support , if Roon was riddled with bugs as you suggest the forum would swamped. Last guess was 300,000 users ???
At a guess look to your network.
OT but thanks for that link. I will have to remove Roon from my old Macbook Pro (2014) runnng Mac OS 11.7, as that forthcoming build will need OS 12 as minimum.
A follow-up, I did submit to support and the new suggestions are to turn off on demand audio analysis speed and background audio analysis in Library settings. Time will tell if that improves overallstability.
It’s a first step at least
Do you have a significant library? I’ll see if i can gather some info from your support post…
What is the downside with turning off the On-demand audio analysis? I hav mine on ‘fast’ right now, but am curious as to the pros and cons with having it on or off.
If both the on-demand audio analysis and background audio analysis are OFF as suggested, then there will be no analysis. I haven’t looked up the support post but surely this is only a step during analysis to see if it makes a difference.
If the on-demand audio analysis is OFF but background audio analysis is ON, as far as I can tell it should not matter because there is no need to do it on demand if it was already done in the background.
If the on-demand audio analysis is ON but background audio analysis is OFF, there is no background load for analysis, which will help with large library additions not clogging the system, and analysis will be done one by one when tracks are actually played, which may add some delay before a track is played.
The latest suggestions make no difference in the continuing instability. At this stage I’m open to any and all suggestions. Again the main issue is that Roon gets hung up on playing tracks. By that I mean I can select an album from Qobuz and Roon will cue it up and start playing. After a track is finished playing, Roon then stalls and doesn’t move onto the next track. The interface just shows the line under the track moving back and forth as if it’s trying to locate the track. Most of the time the fix is to manually push play to get it going again. Then Roon will play tracks. It’s very random as to when it will get hung up again.
The other issue is that after selecting a radio station or a music track, Roon will cue it and start playing it and then after a few minutes will completely stop playing altogether and again the solve is to manually hit play in the app.
Would love to solve this long standing problem that has plagued my system from the start.
I’ve done troubleshooting on my network and cannot find any weaknesses. Hard wired server, robust wifi in an Asus mesh. Zero issues with my network when using any other app besides Roon.