Well I just experienced the new internet requirement after my internet was down all day today. I thought I had a solution, I had downloaded and few albums to my phone so I thought I’d just use ARC on my phone. But ARC kept telling me I had a bad connection and to go to downloaded albums but no matter which downloaded album I tried nothing would play. Very frustrating!!! I love Roon but not being able to play my own music (4TB worth) because my internet is out is just crazy. My renewal just happened but at the new price of $150 per year and not being able to play my own music I might just have to move on to another player. 
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Did you try off-line mode with Roon ARC? I’ve never tried it.
Yes no luck
Arc works without any internet when it’s set to offline mode and has downloads it’s doesn’t need your core to be on at all but anything that requires internet won’t work well on it.
Playing happily when phones in airplane mode here.
Thanks for all the ARC comments but actually I’m more upset about not being able to play my own music without internet service. I get that Roon needs to continue to expand and hosting the files in the cloud makes sense. But maybe there should be an “offline mode” for the server. If they can do it for ARC maybe they can do it for the main product. After all Roon is not a steaming service and while I understand getting meta data for your own files is what the software does, if I haven’t added any new music I don’t understand why it’s a requirement to be connected to the internet. I’ve invested a considerable amount of time and money into my system and can’t use it because I don’t have internet??? It’s just crazy to me that I can’t play the music I own. Roon is not like a TV or music service where you are streaming content. The content is all here at my house. FYI still no internet and I’m in Seattle not in a rural area (CenturyLink fiber issue).
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I Also agree that an offline mode even with limited functionality should exist, at least to be able to access our files on the network.
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Wow. It’s a big problem I think. We are thinking that Internet is guaranteed forever but is not.
I have to install LMS as a backup then. I hope it will be solved - I think licence could be checked once a week because I think it a main reason why Roon needs to be online (?).
My friend thought about Roon licence but he send me the link and told me that he will wait for offline mode because it doesn’t make sens for him to have own server in his network which cant work at all without Internet…
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This used to be the case, but with the arrival of Roon 2.0 some functionality has been moved from the core to the cloud, e.g. ‘search’, as explained by Danny here.
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In case someone is not aware, this is the feature request to vote on:
Personally, I think I have kind of made my peace with it, after being quite vocal about this, mainly because I didn’t see a good way to get internet to my wired Rock if cable internet is out.
However, prompted by another forum post about this, I have figured out that my Fritzbox 6690 lets me USB-tether an Android phone, and will then route over the phone’s cell network. This takes care of my personal issue, unexpected outages of unknown duration, and it’s actually a good solution not just for my Rock but for the whole network. (And I just got an unlimited data plan for ARC). Maybe your router has such an option as well. Or you can try with a USB wifi dongle on your NUC/Nucleus, then use the phone as a wifi hotspot.
Nevertheless, I still think that this is going to come up for a long time, whenever someone has an outage who was not aware of this - and I think there will be ample supply of Roon users who aren’t, for a long time to come. So, if I was Roon, I would be looking into implementing a simplified fallback state where you can at least list albums and play music for a few days. But I’m not Roon.
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All the information the core needs to search local files is in the local DB, is it not. A basic search function can’t be too much to ask?
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So would I, but I’m not Roon either.
With reference to local files, yes.
Well, apparently it is, at least one that works as Roon would wish. Personally, I’d accept a hobbled version for offline use, but it doesn’t look like that is likely to happen.
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Of course. No need for searching online files if you have no internet…
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Agreed - just give me a few days at least. FYI still no internet (3 days now) serious fiber issue due to construction. Funny thing is when the internet goes down you’re prepped for no TV or surfing the web because the content is locked up in the cloud, but locally stored music just shouldn’t be held hostage to an internet connection. Thank god for my iPhone hot spot or it would be the wilderness for me 
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Hi, I tried ARC out and it works for me when I am offline. I have downloaded some local albums before (see Download section under My library within the app) and I can play these albums when I am offline with my smartphone. Do you want to say that this workflow doesn´t work on your side?
Thanks got it working on Sat - but given the system I built and invested in it’s crazy that I’m reduced to an iPhone and a blue tooth speaker
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That is why I don’t buy ARC as the solution for this situation. ARC is ok for portable or mobile use. I will not use ARC to feed my crappy high end stereo. It will just make it crappier.
I am staying with Roon 1.8 Legacy.
Welcome to Roon 2.0.
To not have an offline mode for Roon when it exists for ARC (fledgling product) begs the question why? I think that there is more to it than at first might come to mind. I might be off base here but my guess would be that there has to be a reason that makes sense.
One possibility is that Roon wants to move away from being a hardware seller and wants Roon to eventually not need a local computer running to do the search work etc.
I am also guessing Roon is looking at an end goal of being purchased by one of the larger streaming platforms (Tidal, Spotify, other?) and this makes much more sense if they are a software only entity.
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Clearly yes at least in part, and this goes back at least to 2017 in Danny posts:
And recently
Id have thought that just the straighforward ‘filter’ functionality would be acceptable for most in an offline scenario.
You can play and filter local content when the internet is down, doesnt seem an unreasonable ask or be impossible for Roon to achieve. It has been called ‘limp mode’ in the main thread and I think that is the best way to describe it.
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