Over the past few weeks I have been having difficulty playing 192kHz files from Qobuz. The file will play fine for the first few minutes and then start to distort and finally Roon will stop the track and after a 30 second or more break go to the next track/file.
I know it’s not a bandwidth or network issue since I can stream 4K video to my smart TV with no issues. I also know that it’s not Qobuz since I can play the same 192kz files just fine using the Qobuz app.
Also the problem only seems to be with 192kHz files from Qobuz since 96kHz files from qobuz play correctly through Roon and 192kHz local files also play fine.
All Roon devices are connected via Ethernet (Router to Roon core and Roon core to endpoints).
I’ve had the same problem all year, and finally limited streaming quality to the 96KHz and lower a month or so ago. So far no issues. This started early in 2022. From 2019 through 2021 I never had a problem.
Maybe not bandwidth but certainly network. The demands of Roon on a network are generally 2x of the native. More info needed please. What is plugged into what starting from incoming internet to endpoint. Who is your ISP? What part of the world are you in?
Can you play 24/192 files without issue?
Video and audio don’t stream the same way and just because one works is not guarantee of the other.
I think it’s worth raising a ticket in the support category, other users are having problems so
it’ll benefit everyone…
Details of what is required can be found here……
The Roon has been behaving when using Qobuz has been somewhat problematic these last few updates. Slow loading times, long gaps between tracks, problems with playing many high resolution files and trouble synching with my library. Sounds to me like that section of the program code needs a rewrite.
My issue with tech support is that they always seem to want to verify that the problem isn’t with your Roon setup. However, in this case, with so many users having similar issues they should just cut to the chase and look at what, on their and Qobuz’s end of things, could be causing the problems. Because the interface and integration with the streaming services, as good as it and I do love it, is in need of a few repairs
Unfortunately that’s bound to be part of the investigation. They, support, would want to start investigating at the remote or customer’s end and work back through the system/network.
I’ve been using Roon for nearly 7 years and network devices have caused many problems with streaming especially Tidal & Qobuz.
Simple things like signing out of Qobuz & back in again have resolved problems for many, but there’s a plethora of minor problems which have an impact on performance.
I’ve been using Qobuz with Roon since it because available in the US, multiple Roon systems, almost always with alpha/early access core and apps, and I can’t recall a major problem, just minor niggles like Qobuz proposing albums that are not yet released and so have all (or all but a couple) tracks unavailable. Streaming itself has been close to flawless, maybe a few glitches over several years, both of complete albums and multiple resolution playlists. One thing that I have noticed, though, is that Roon’s implementation of Qobuz streaming doesn’t really stream between Qobuz servers and the Roon core. Instead, it downloads the whole track or at least big chunks of it in bursts that go as fast as my Internet connection allows; actual streaming only happens between Roon core and endpoint. This behavior could cause problems with some network configurations in which bursts may saturate bandwidth and interfere with streaming from core to endpoint.
I’ve been using Roon for just over a year now. The experience was pretty smooth with only minor hiccups which I will outline until recently. I originally set up Roon on my iMac (Late 2015 8 GB Ram) and on my Router using the Wifi Network. My ISP is pretty consistent with minimal disruptions (maybe 2 in the last 5 years) and provides consistent speeds 100 Mbps Down/50 Mbps Up.
The hiccups experienced:
First, was more to do with my VPN which was prone to just choose any time to shut down and then update. Unfortunately at that stage I had automatic updates on, and when it shuts down it stops all internet traffic and doesn’t restart same until I manually restart the VPN. Therefore I had numerous occasions when Roon stopped completely if I was streaming.
Second, was that occasionally I would get notifications that Qobuz was loading slowly with the occasional skipping and this seemed to be after I had added music from the Streaming Service to the library and Roon was processing/adding data etc.
Third, was that as I would do a backup every second day, Roon remained on for up to 48 hrs before being stopped or rebooted. Early on I noticed that the Room memory usage just kept rising until the computer choked and Roon stopped playing. A restart normally fixed this up., however I upgraded memory to 16 GB about 7 months ago and this all but eliminated the memory creep. (See later)
Fourth was search function (enough said) until
After the Version 2 release:
The following has occurred:
Search (enough said)
Qobuz loading slowly became a regular issue (certainly numerous times per day to the point of being frustrated) after Version 2, particularly when I was streaming 192/24. So much so that I bit the bullet and connected the Roon Core and major endpoints by Ethernet about 3 months ago just after Version 2 was released.
The Qobuz loading slowly notifications dropped in frequency after connecting to Ethernet, however what I did notice, more so (but not exclusively) when playing 192/24 files was that I am always waiting for the next song to start, so much so at times that I would get up to see if Roon had stopped working completely.
In November I set up 100 songs (Mostly Albums) in 192/24. Just so it would be easier to see and work out how much extra time it took over the Play Length it took. When played on Roon it added 20 minutes to the play time at average of 12 seconds between tracks.
I was trialing Audirvana after V2 was released so I played the same 100 songs on Audirvāna Studio and in total, 95 seconds was added to play time at average of less than 1 second between tracks. Furthermore I had no issues at all with any delay at any BitRate playing on Audirvana, whereas this continued regularly on Roon. I was also continually frustrated by search and adding music (at that time i had already reverted to adding music in Qobuz App and letting it sync to Roon in due course. Therefore I took a subscription to Audirvana and was switching between the 2 players, but then nearly always searching and adding new music in Audirvana.
Earlier this week I again noticed Roon having large gaps between tracks so I just added a playlist of 4hrs 26 mins duration (a limited scattering of maybe a few 192/24 files) resulted in an additional 7 min 2 sec of playtime or just over 8 seconds between tracks.
Same playlist on Audirvāna resulted in additional 30 seconds of playtime or less than half a second average between tracks.
Until yesterday morning the Memory Buildup was a non issue. So yesterday morning Roon had massive increase in Memory to over 10.5 GB which shut Roon down from playing. I restarted Roon and left if off for 20 mins or so and then Roon when restarted, took just under 1 hour for Qobuz to finish syncing. 11.33 am till 12.29 pm. It has also never taken a sync to take that long.
I used Audirvana from 12.30 pm till 5.10 am this morning and with 60+ Qobuz tracks still in the queue and cache. Audirvana was taking up 5.2 GB, whilst Roon, left open since 12.30 pm, but not playing and with nothing in the queue was somehow at 3.26 GB. Roon whilst open, but not in use was also using 53.5% of CPU (actually 13.5% as it is spread across 4 cores) whereas Audirvana whilst playing was using 1.4% of CPU (actually 0.35% as it is spread across 4 cores).
I know there are other threads on the Gapless Playback Issue as well so will post this on there as well. Something between Roon and Qobuz is not communicating well at all.
It might be indicating a hardware failure or issue if it’s only recently started. What is you core running on ? The newer updates just might be revealing it more. Or it’s related to the same issue causing the long pauses and gapless playback issues that are happening to you and others. Something is definitely going on but you have to rule out the obvious things first. It’s frustrating when users don’t have the same issues and point fingers saying it must be your setup, standard forum response unfortunately and it’s been proven wrong many times before that yes it is Roon.
It seems Qobuz never fails in finding new and interesting ways to error. A couple of weeks ago it was starting every track 0.1 seconds in. Last week it was replaying about a tenth of a second of music when 5 seconds has elapsed on every song.
This week I tried going without Roon and went back to the B&W Music app. That couldn’t get through an album without skipping to the next track at some point.
I feel like giving up on streaming altogether and going back to CDs and / or file downloads. Seems like the only people on here who have stable performance are all IT experts / professionals, and I ain’t, and have less than zero interest in becoming one.
My main with Team Roon’s tech support, or what was once known as customer service, is that I have to do everything through a very open and very public forum. I don’t like or want to do that. I would gladly give @support all the information that they request via a private message or email but i don’t why anyone with access to this forum can read about my computer, my network, my music library, my subscriptions, etc. That’s just not how real tech support works. I’m requesting special treatment since I feel that everyone who pays for a Roon subscription deserves proper and personalized support.
And now I’m doubly frustrated since I am not the only one experiencing issues with music from Qobuz and Tidal played via Roon.
Suffice it to say that my Roon core has plenty of horsepower, I have a brand new and rather expensive router and I have been streaming music for about 15 years so this is not my first rodeo.
Does this happen on all zones? This might be a long shot, but I had a similar experience with Roon/Tidal a couple of years ago on one zone only. The symptoms were as you described, sometimes skipping tracks on an album without playing anything. The endpoint causing the problem was a Windows 10 PC, and I finally narrowed it down to having swapped out the network adapter on it. In the end I had to do a full Windows reinstall, and its been fine ever since.
You could also try enabling or (disabling!) sample rate conversion for the zone to see if the problem goes away.
First off, I agree with your points on the support model including the issues you raised around privacy. Roon is a very, very complicated system and it gets more complicated by the moment. On top of that, every installation is what we sometimes call a “snowflake” in the industry. You’d be hard-pressed to find two Roon users with identical combinations of bandwidth, home network infrastructure, music collections, endpoints, etc. This community is actually one of the most proactive and supportive communities I’ve been a part of - that’s a testament to the structure and guidelines put in place but it’s also a function of the outstanding and plentiful moderators, the nature of the product, and probably the demographics of the customer base. It’s a good thing that there is a crowdsource aspect to support - that shouldn’t go away. But it is, in my opinion, problematic that asking the crowd for help (which is, let’s be honest, what “support” is here) is the only option. The privacy issues are legitimate but I think equally at issue is the fact that many issues just never get resolved. And posters like @Jazzfan_NJ have to essentially fend off many well-meaning folks who are often drawing energy away from the legitimacy, and support need, of the poster. I know the posts are meant to be helpful but there are often so opinionated, and there are so many of them, that the noise level has to make it hard for Roon to even provide support.
Anyhow, that’s a rant. I don’t unfortunately see a path to change without a massive scale up in the money Roon spends on support. Some large-multiple massive.
Rant aside, and obviously hypocritically, I do want to talk about the issue you’re having.
I’m going to assume you’re using Roon Remote, and not ARC.
When playing Qobuz, the core pulls music to itself and then distributes that music to the endpoints around your house. When you see a playback issue like the one you’re describing, it is not necessarily indicative of an issue between the core and Qobuz. This is true even when the Roon client tells you that Qobuz is loading slowly. I have seen this again and again myself - if there is an issue between the core and your client, the client will show an error that indicates that the source music service, such as Qobuz, is the issue when the problem is actually the communication between the core and the endpoint.
The core is capable of using a number of protocols to play music to an endpoint. That includes Roon’s own protocol, RAAT, but also AirPlay, and others. RAAT, in particular, is susceptible to issues and sometimes those issues are exacerbated by the underlying client hardware. I have been experiencing this first hand over the past few weeks as I’ve played with a couple of WiFi-based endpoints in my house. With those endpoints, I see the same kind of Qobuz issues you see and they get worse as the sampling frequency of the tracks I’m playing increase.
I’ve read their posts on networking in the past - they’re one of the smartest networking folks around here. When they pattern match to a networking issue, it’s worth paying attention. They could be wrong, but I think there’s a real chance that they are correct. Especially if there’s WiFi in the mix.
Last point on this. I have a pretty exceptional wired and wireless network. I’ve accepted that there are some Roon use cases that are just never going to work for me. One of these is a Chord Mojo 2 + Poly (Poly is a Roon Ready streamer) on WiFi in my house. I just can’t keep it working, especially with 192/24 and above tracks. Similarly, I have a DAP that can run the Android Roon Remote client, and I struggle with it, too, for similar reasons. ARC - even within a house - can help because it uses a different approach to streaming.
So before you dismiss @ipeverywhere’s assertion that you should consider your network, maybe at least share a bit about your signal and network paths. And I do wish you could do this privately with a Roon support rep but unfortunately, that’s not in the cards
Thank you for well stated reply. Just about all your points are true but I do take issue with the fact that Roon’s insistence on asking the user to gather and then post lots of details about their computer, network, audio equipment and digital music collection is at least these two things:
A major privacy concern.
A major stalling tactic.
I’ve already stated my privacy concerns but it’s also the second item that irks me. While many users are experiencing issues with Roon and its streaming services integration these users are kept busy gathering the “necessary” information to submit to Roon support. Meanwhile Roon support gets to ignore the real problem: Roon and its streaming services integration
I have a very large digital music library which is now getting close to one million tracks (a mix of local files and streaming content) and I realize that I need lots of computing horse power for Roon to be able to function correctly. And I have lots of horse power and a very reliable network. I use Ethernet for most of my Roon endpoints. I’ve been streaming music for over 15 years so I kind of know when a problem is being caused by my hardware or network and when it’s not.
I follow all of the recommended best practice hardware and network requirements that are outlined in the Roon Knowledge Base so I do expect things to work as advertised.
Anyway since you asked so nicely, here’s a description of my Roon signal path and hardware information:
