Roon ARC has been stable for me and the upgrade to Roon 2.0 was an absolute breeze but unfortunately after a day of playing with Roon ARC I’m afraid it’s not yet the solution for me but it is really close.
I accept I’m probably in the minority with my use case but I am not 100% alone since I have seen other posters here wanting the same. My library on my Roon Core is almost entirely ripped CDs and purchased lossless downloads all stored locally. I currently maintain a shadow copy of my library in 320kbps AAC that is set as my iTunes library so that I can use iTunes on my PC to sync my entire library in 320kbps AAC to my iPhone so that I have access to anything in my collection even when out of a signal area. Also, in the UK I get the impression that unlimited data plans are less widespread than in the USA so even when connected I don’t want to chew through my limited data or (just as important to me since I do a lot of walking) incur the extra battery drain that streaming over mobile would give me.
I had hoped that Roon ARC would save me the trouble of manually maintaining my AAC shadow library (which also requires me to manually add extra tags to get the sort order right in iTunes and the Apple Music app) and avoid the need to even install iTunes on my PC. Roon ARC is tantalisingly close to doing what I want but there are currently 2 things that are missing that prevent it from being the solution I was hoping for…
1 - The ability to compress files being downloaded to Roon ARC. Roon 2.0 does allow the user to set a compression setting in Roon ARC when streaming to ARC, e.g. “Balanced” compresses to 256kbps Opus which from my research is probably perfectly good enough and maybe not far off 320kbs AAC which for mobile listening was probably a bit of an overkill anyway. If only Roon would also extend those settings to downloaded files that would solve my first issue since I don’t have enough space on my phone to download all of my library in the original lossless format.
2 - In this initial release initiating a download from ARC is strictly on a per-album or per-playlist basis so downloading an entire library with many hundreds of albums one album at a time is more tedium and time expended than I am willing to tolerate. The regular Roon remote allows long presses on albums in album view to select multiple items, and there is a “Select All” option in a drop down menu when one is in the middle of a multi-select, and once a multi-selection is complete there is an action menu to perform an action on all albums selected which in my case would be “Download”. Implementing such a multi-select with select-all option in the ARC album view, and possibly other views as well for consistency, would allow me to select all albums in my library and download them all in only a few clicks/presses.
I do still congratulate Roon on 2.0, it is clearly doing exactly what a lot of people want and it seems to have all the key components with just a couple of tweaks required to 100% meet my needs which I hope means that in the not too distant future I can ditch Apple Music and iTunes and use Roon ARC as my sole music source on my iPhone.
In case anyone has similar requirements to me, and to head of any perfectly reasonable and I’m sure well-meant comments that I should post my requirements as feature requests, both of my issues have already been posted as feature requests so if deemed appropriate please do go and add your votes…
Option to compress ARC downloads feature request - Option to convert downloaded files - Roon Software / Feature Suggestions - Roon Labs Community
Implement multi-select for ARC album view - Allow multi-select and select-all for albums, artists etc in Roon ARC library screens - Roon Software / Feature Suggestions - Roon Labs Community