Question about expected ARC behavior with downloaded music…

Let’s say I use ARC to download music files from my local Roon library to my iPhone so I can listen to it on my phone offline. Then I remove the music files from my Roon local library. Will ARC still play the music files download to my phone?

I don’t know, but I’m curious as to why you would do that? And if did, would this be a problem?

You can delete and remove from Library in ARC.

Long version…

I’d like to be able to use ARC to load an Mp3 (128kps max) version of my music library onto my phone for offline listening away from home. My data plan is too limited to allow a lot of streaming and full rez files would quickly gobble up phone’s memory. However, ARC doesn’t offer “down converting” when downloading music files.

My current solution is to keep a duplicate copy of my local music collection in Mp3 format, then use iTunes to sync the Mp3 copies with my iPhone. This allows me to keep a copy of my entire music collection on my phone to suit any mood that strikes while I’m away from home. While this works, it would be nice not to have to use iTunes (not a fan, frankly).

I wondered if it would work if I added the Mp3 folder as Watched Folder in Roon, then downloaded the Mp3 collection to my phone via ARC, then remove the Mp3 folder from the Roon Watched Folder list to avoid unnecessary duplicate clutter in my Roon collection.

Which brings me to the nature of my question, ie - would removing the Mp3 folder from the Roon Watched Folder list affect the ability to listen to the Mp3s that were downloaded to my phone via ARC?

BTW, if such a scheme as I described above (ARC able to play downloaded Mp3s even if they no longer appear in my Roon library) did work, how would I go about accomplishing the initial download to ARC on my phone en mass (about 6200 tracks)?

I poked around in ARC and didn’t see an option to filter albums according to location and select all for download. I do see the option to download a playlist, so I guess I would need to create an Mp3 playlist in Roon, then select that playlist in ARC to download all the tracks en mass?

Another thought….would having two watched folders with the same music, one with Mp3 versions and the other with FLAC versions, make a mess of my Roon database? I certainly don’t want to create more problems than it might solve! :hushed:

The MP3 files can be added as alternate versions on different storage, with the FLAC version set as primary.

When creating a playlist is Roon Remote or selecting for download in ARC, choose the alternate versions.

That said, you could simply try downloading an album in ARC and then delete it in Roon.

I think I’ll give this a try and see what happens.

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I did some experimenting. Results were disappointing. :frowning:

  1. Albums downloaded to ARC for playing offline must be present in the Roon library, otherwise, ARC reports them as “Unavailable”. For various reasons, my preference is not to have two copies of everything in my Roon library.

  2. It seems the only way to download many albums en mass is to create a playlist first, then download that playlist. While such playlist will then appear in ARC, I don’t see a way to view the downloads by album, only in “Playlists” where you are presented with a huge list of individual tracks.

  3. Trying to search for what I want in downloads in ARC can be difficult or impossible. Some search functions aren’t available in Offline Mode (Tags for instance). There is no search function available in the Download screen. In order to easily listen to what I want at the moment offline, ie - a particular genre or artist, or downloaded album in a playlist, I would have to create and download a separate Playlist for each scenario. Essentially, navigation of downloads is very limited.

As much as I don’t care for iTunes, it works much better for my use case, so I’ll just stick with what I’ve been doing.

Perhaps ARC will grow to better suit my needs, but right now it’s a no go. :frowning:

BTW, this experiment really highlighted for me that despite what Roon has said about ARC being a solution for offline listening of your music collection, IMO, it is too limited to for this purpose. Perhaps if you just want to download a few albums or some playlists, it would be ok, but for offline access to your entire collection, no.

PS - After deleting the playlists I downloaded to ARC, all my playlists available disappeared! The only way I could see them again in ARC was to delete the ARC app and download it again from the App Store. Weird!

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I think point 2 here needs to be flagged as an issue, it’s impossible to use as is for some key use cases. For example, I’m flying tomorrow, so I created a playlist with all of my albums and have offlined this. I now have a playlist with 10k tracks in it and can play albums from it fine when I’m connected to the internet. As soon as I go into aeroplane mode, my Albums list is empty, and I just have the playlist with 10K tracks and no grouping to help find an album.

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According to this thread, ARC isn’t allowing playing of some downloaded albums when the phone is in Airplane Mode. :roll_eyes:

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That is a better solution than allowing the files to be deleted on the core after downloading them to the phone.

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Did you turn on offline mode in ARC ? I just added two tracks to a playlist downloaded the playlist in ARC and then turned on offline mode. The albums don’t show up under albums offline or online but I can see my playlist and can jump to the album from the … next to a track all tracks downloaded can be played.


Not relevant anymore they added offline mode in last update. See above post.

I’m not sure I follow. How does the Offline Mode switch help in situations where one needs to turn on Airplane Mode?

Yes, I turned on offline mode. That all works as you say, but I’ve got a playlist with 10k individual tracks in it and no way to search, so just getting to a track in an album I want to listen to, to then be able to jump to that album via the menu is a LOT of scrolling.

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Roon needs to know it’s in offline mode. They added to allow it to work with no internet.

You can still use the filters and download tag in the tracks section to find something specific then same option to jump to the album applies from any track. Not perfect I agree but it’s a workaround.

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So it would work properly in Airplane mode if Offline Mode is also turned on? Am I understanding correctly?

Yes exactly.

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Aha, thanks for that! It’s definitely workable.

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Not sure why it doesn’t add them to albums though as it does in full Roon so maybe a bug here.

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