I am auditioning Roon in the two week trial period, and I am running into the following problems. I did try to read through the community posts and some others have similar problems but no suggested fixes are working for me. All of them seem network related (except the Airfoil compatibility issue described which happens even when I output to the Core’s speakers).
Set up:
Core running on Windows Desktop PC (not particularly optimized towards music, more of an allrounder) - Asus z87 Pro motherboard, i7 4770k CPU, Nvidia GTX 670 OC graphics card, Boot drive - 128 GB SDD (Roon installed here), D: drive (where most music files are stored) spinning 2TB 7200rpm Hard disk; some music files on WD My-cloud network drive.
I mainly output to Audioengine powered speakers or to my headphone through Chord DAC/Amp. Roon also outputs to bluetooth headphones and speakers pretty well.
Quite basic.
Now my problems:
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I cannot but cannot seem to connect to the core from Roon remotes. I have downloaded both the android version (on my LG G4) and iOS (on my ipad air) but both are failing to connect to the core. It sometimes ‘sees’ the core, but fails to connect after trying for sometime. It has not successfully connected once. Yes, I was on the same network and accessing internet through the same router (the Core PC through wired LAN and the remotes obviously though wifi).
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I have a Polk Woodbourne airplay plus bluetooth speaker in my living room. It is a bit far from my core to connect though Bluetooth plus quality over Airplay is usually better. However, though Roon can see my Woodbourne and seems to think it is outputting to it, no sound comes out of the speakers. This is important to me as I don’t have any other speakers in my living room (my wife has banished tower speakers to my entertainment room) I don’t have any other Airplay speakers handy to see whether the problem is generally with Airplay or just this speaker; but I do know it plays music through iTunes (on my PC or ipad) or from any other player through Airfoil perfectly fine. Which brings me to my third issue…
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Airfoil: I thought if I cannot play to the Airplay speaker directly, I can at least output to the ‘System Output Zone’ which I have set Airfoil to manage and then let Airfoil send the signal over Airplay to the Woodbourne speakers. In theory it should work since I have used this set up for other players such as Windows Media Player. But with Roon, garbage (high pitched noises) come out through the speakers. Stranger still, this is the case even when outputting to the System connected endpoints such as the Chord DAC or even through the PC Sound card (for experiment). This is strange, since airfoil seems to work fine with other programs. Also, this happens with Flac, DSD as well as MP3s and AACs.
Due to this, the Roon experience for me has been limited to a single PC, which is not ideally how I would like to use it. Yes ultimately, I will not be dependent on Airplay but mostly on hi-res capable network attached endpoints connected to my tower speakers (currently the receiver/ amp is not network capable), but I would like my remotes and Airplay options to work.
Thanks for any help.
P.S: Don’t know if this is relevant, but usual modem (with dual band wireless ac capability) has stopped working and currently I am stuck with an older router cum modem (Beetel 450TC1) which is only capable of 802.11 b/g (not even n). However, I can do all the usual stuff like netflix, accessing media flies on the TV from my MyCloud etc. Playing to airplay from other programs etc (just a little slower).