Just drove 860 miles today. Listened to a lot of podcasts on BBC Sounds.
Perhaps you could clean the surface of your phone 
iPad app going to be released?
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Roon will never be mainstream. It requires self hosting, is expensive when you consider it comes with no content, it doesnāt interface with the big streaming boys, and technically is a nightmare to get working for the bog standard person. It will reach a point in the market where it will reach its ceiling and that will be that unless they completely change tact.
What streaming quality setting are you using? Using the lowest setting (Bandwidth Optimized), today while on a walk I didnāt experience any interruptions with 1 bar signal at times (2-3 most the other times). Even at the lowest setting it still sounded fine to me (iPhone 12 Pro).
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It would be good to note that Roon ARC is a music player app while Roon Remote is a Core controller app. These are two very different functions.
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Currently sat in the car now with Arc playing with original content selected. Only had a slight drop out when I went through no manās land. But overall, a very smooth experience.
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My Roon remote plays music
My wife uses Roon during the day in her workplace, but for leisure mostly listens to podcasts via Spotify. I listen to my podcasts on the BBC Sounds app.
These are not workarounds, the BBC is by far the largest spoken word broadcaster worldwide with a massive audience and there is a vast library available online through their app. You donāt need a server and you donāt need Roon to replicate what is already out there. Like most other people, she subscribes to a long list of podcasts and listens to them mostly when out walking or driving around.
I rarely listen to music when travelling, if I do I use Qobuz and sometimes download some things for offline listening.
Being a longtime QNAP owner, I have been able to play music from my server remotely using the QMusic app, but the novelty wore off after a few albums on the beach about 5 years ago.
I think Darkoās interest in a mobile app may be because he listens to a lot of Electro and that kind of thing, much of which is released on CD and not provided to online streaming services.
Iām sure there are a lot of people who will make use of it, I use Roon mainly for multi-room and have about 30 Roon Ready devices.
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Thatās because the app you installed gave you a Roon Remote (controller) plus a Roon Bridge (endpoint). There was also the option to install a Roon Core (server). There are these 3 components and they can be on the same machine or on different machines.
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 Iām afraid itās not yet the solution for me but it is really close.
I accept Iām 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 donāt 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 forā¦
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. āBalancedā 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 donāt 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 āSelect Allā 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 āDownloadā. 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 Iām 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 votesā¦
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
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Roon 2.0 - a very, very good start! Thanks for all the evident hard work, devs. Roon users like to moan and groan - myself very much included! But this is a great leap forward, truly. And while thereāll be issues with any big rollout, this seems very well implemented overall.
My experience has had a couple of hiccups, but Iām at work streaming from my own library Iāve curated over 30+ years - itās great. Auto setup did not work - perhaps more the fault of my 10 year old Nighthawk router than Roon - but I simply forwarded the port on my router manually, then it worked. Sound quality with 256 kbps Opus is great - I feel lossless is overkill for mobile/bluetooth. Now, if I could just get FLACs converted to Opus for downloads also - I assume that may be on the roadmap, I hope so - I may finally be able to retire my Plex music library and the plexamp app.
When I arrived at work today Iām on company Wifi and ARC couldnāt find my core. However, I toggled Wifi off and with 5g the core was found - turned Wifi back on and still have the core - not even a playback pause when switching over. Maybe it was an initial one-time issue.
Also, I canāt get ARC to work when my Windows 10 PC where the Roon core runs has the VPN engaged. Even when the VPN has LAN traffic traffic engaged and Roon remote & playback works. I know it has to do with the port forwarding/different IP so Iāll have to futz with it some more. Iām able to stream & sync with the VPN on with Plex so it should be possible.
Anyway, people seem to be describing their experiences here so I thought Iād chime in. A few kinks to iron out and I hope to transcode downloaded tracks to Opus/AAC/ and/or Mp3 soon to conserve storage space/data usage/battery life, but itās mostly been a very positive experience. Cheers!
Iām in the UK too. Maybe unlimited data canāt be had, but 100GB monthly data, which I have, is not hard to find. Iām with EE which has good performance and coverage nationwide.
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Thanks. For me battery life is also a pretty big deal though. I often go on 6-ish hour hikes with travel time either side of that and pulling down mobile data over an often quite weak connection for hours and hours isnāt something I really want to do. Airplanes are also a big use case for me.
Despite my local storage disappointment I am keeping ARC installed on my iPhone. Even with my 3GB monthly data limit I can imagine that, while I am waiting/hoping for Roon to implement the features I need to complete the picture for me, I will still find times when I might want to stream relatively briefly to get at something from Qobuz that I just have to hear and it will be nice to do that via the Roon interface and see it within the context of the rest of my library metadata rather than use the Qobuz app.
In fairness I should also say that Iām a cheapskate re mobile phone plans. I pay just under Ā£5 a month for my plan that includes unlimited UK texts and minutes plus 100 international minutes and EU voice/text roaming and even that is overkill for me; I typically use less than 1GB of my data allowance each month. I know an extra Ā£10 a month which is what I think a bigger plan would cost me is a fairly trivial sum (to me) but I try to minimise monthly recurring charges on principle since the odd Ā£10 or Ā£20 here and there can soon add up to a more annoying total increase in monthly bills. Thatās one reason why I bought a lifetime Roon license (a decision made within about 30 minutes of first installing the trial).
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Itās a 2012 Mac Mini with 16gb RAM and 512 SSD. I was so pleased with it a had a chronically crippled (by low 4gb memory) 2014 one and did the same thing and both work like a treat. The Ubuntu version is 22.04 which is the one you can download now from Ubuntu PC operating system | Ubuntu. You will need a keyboard and mouse (wired or from a dongle - not the Bluetooth Apple ones)
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Iām not sure I understand why you maintain a separate library?
Within Apple Music you can select to import higher rates at a number of resolutions when transferring to your iPhone.
Because itās #%# Apple . All those years ago I ripped my CDs to FLAC and opted for FLAC as the download format for all the downloads that I have purchased since and of course Apple doesnāt support FLAC so iTunes doesnāt see any of the files in my main Roon library. I could bulk convert all of my FLAC files to ALAC which, as a lossless to lossless conversion wouldnāt affect sound quality, but I havenāt got round to doing that yet and I sort of begrudge having to do it which is why Iāve stuck with my current scheme. It will all become a quirk of my audiophile history if Roon ARC evolves as I hope it will.
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If the masses are to be reached then something like a Roku app would need to be created. Iāve no idea what technical gymnastics would have to be overcome to make it work but it could secure the future of Roon.
I am a heavy classical musician and an audiophile, as well as a strong practitioner of cryptocurrency.
What Roon ARC means to me is that it is a decentralized application compared to either Apple Music or Tidal and also Qobuz. It seems to have a weak life now, but I believe it has a brighter future.
Decentralization is the future, and I am from China, even though we all know how hard it is to enjoy the same internet benefits as the rest of the world in China right now.
Roonās management of classical music is excellent and has features that neither FB2000 nor JRiver, including Audirvana or Apple Music, that I have ever used can do. It can subdivide artists into composers, conductors, performers, and bands. It would be nice if Roon could add a record label element in the future so that you can categorize and search music by the label.
Congratulations on the successful release of Roon 2.0 and the Roon ARC mobile app. I have promoted Roon 2.0 and Roon ARC on several audiophile forums in China and also set up a QQ group called Roon Music Salon to help more Chinese people with their troubles when using Roon.
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