Qobuz 44/16 data rate streamed via Roon is larger than streamed via Volumio

Hello Noris,
Yes it is true, the WiFi connection to my Volumio powered Hifiberries drops from time to time and I have to reboot them. I am not sure if Roon causes that. I feel that Volumio via WiFi might be a bit unstable, I had to disable the fallback-Hotspot already as they would not find their original WIFI otherwise.
The 2Mbit stream into Roon runs smoothly and allows 44/16 streaming, but makes simultaneous surfing a bit of a challenge. I have set my Surf-IPad to high priority and my Vaio running Roon as background task in my Fritz rooter, which helps a bit.
I try internal and come back.
I have another place where my Hifiberries are tethered to the same Roon Server via Ethernet and they never drop out (but then I have 50 Mbit/s at that place)

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Sorry, Noris,
I was a bit slow catching the problem, I grasped it only after seeing other posts on this: Roon causes a Raspi4 running Volumio to crash while on WiFi. The VolumioRaspi simply disappears from the Network and needs a hard reboot to comeback.
I can sort of trigger that by streaming at my full 2Mbit bandwidth via Roon on a WiFi tethered Win10 to Volumio while using other apps on Windows that consume a lot of bandwidth, like complicated websites or an Adobe update. At some point, either Win or Roon (or my Fritzbox) decides to drop the WiFi stream to Volumio, possibly because there is nothing left to stream and that causes Volumio to close the WiFi down. Happens more easily when streaming multi-room to two Raspi4. I am in no mood tracking WiFi packages, but will observe it bit closer. Never happens while on Ethernet.
(I suspect that Volumio is not very forgiving for WiFi timeouts. It has a build in feature to start its own hotspot once it can not find its attached WiFi on startup any more. For me, it did that on every second startup as it does not seem to look for its WiFi very carefully. I had to disable that function, but that just fixes that problem but not the WiFi behavior)

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Why use Volumio? Have you tried Ropieee it’s made for Roon and works flawlessly over WiFi. I have three endpoints running it and it never drops a beat. There is also RopieeeXL if you want the added features of Airplay, UPnP, squeezelite or HQP NAA.

As of 6 month ago I could not find a Raspi software that would enable HDMI with the Roon bridge except Volumio. I heard that that could be tweaked via the configuration file for most packages, but am in no mood to try that.

You can with dietpi and could set up the webui extension with chromium to get now playing up if that’s what your after.

Ropieee completely disables HDMI audio so that would make it useless for your needs.

Hi @Joachim_Strobel,

Nice sleuthing! It does sound like a Volumio issue in that case.
I would give DietPi a try, I believe HDMI should work.

Yes, but in the end … it is Roon.
When playing 44/16 via 2.1 Mbit/s Roon caches constantly as 2.1 is below 2x streaming, so it is always caching the next title, except when playing a 4 minute track followed by a 2 minute long track.
But then, whenever there is something stealing bandwidth from Roon, Roon is not gently waiting and playing the current track out of the cache for a while but rather skips the rest of the track and starts the next one. I assume it gets nervous as it might not be able to top up the RAAT stream. So it jumps a title, playing that for a while and then jumps again. Not sure why, but it seems to like doing that, skipping titles whenever network trouble is ahead, judging from other posts. And, while jumping it occasionally pulls Volumio down.
So, Roon somehow needs to have a laid-back mood where it will continue playing the current track from the cache, having faith that the stream will come back.
Streaming with 320kbits helps a bit. Still Roons uses my full bandwidth as if there is no tomorrow, but has a bit more patients when the stream gets tight.
I am sure there is more and I only understand less than half - but then taming Roon is fun too.

So, finally a solution to tame Roon’s network hunger:
When playing Roon’s radio, it will place only one song in the queue. Once that is cached, there is network silence from Roon, starting again with the next song.
The same can be achieved by Shuffle from a bookmarked collection of Albums (I guess Roon pipes this through its Radio task, it shows the same thumbs up-down icon for selecting the next song…). A bookmark can consist of one album only.
PS: There is a small bug: Roon does not shuffle a bookmarked collection of Qobuz albums with 96/24 on my 2Mbit stream even though I limited Qobuz to 44/16. It plays them as Album.

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Thanks for the feedback here @Joachim_Strobel and for letting us know you were able to use Roon Radio to get around the slow network speeds.

I’ll forward this to the team for future consideration.

… I know, it getS boring, but I found a neat solution to Window’s use of bandwidth for upgrading: in Window’s update configuration there is a setting limiting the bandwidth Windows uses to download updates. I limited it to 0.5 Mb/s and Roon is very happy now, not skipping a single track…(Win pro version)

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… now that is a neat workaround!

Hi @Joachim_Strobel,

That’s actually a very interesting observation, thanks for letting us know!
Glad to hear that Roon is working much more stable for you after that change.

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