I have to agree with @jazzfan_NJ and @James_Borders1
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.
Frustrating….