Roon 2.0 -- Remote Playback Works with VPN (No ARC Required)

For those of us who don’t want to open ports on our router/firewall for security reasons, Roon 2.0 remote playback works over VPN on a different subnet. I just updated to Roon Core 2.0 (build 1128) & Roon Remote for iOS 2.0 (build 1127). With wifi disabled I was able to connect via VPN over LTE (Wireguard VPN on pfSense firewall) and the iPhone was listed as a playback device.

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I had roon working on VPN a while ago, but I kept running into issues with poor signal causing it to skip tracks, which happens more than you think when driving around. I am eager to see how Arc performs in the spotty signal areas.

While you can do this if it works for you, ARC will be far more resilient, especially on mobile networks, as it’s buffering and decoding the files on the phone instead of streaming from the Core in real time. The VPN solution would break as soon as you had a few seconds of interruption. On mobile networks, just driving/walking/cycling around, it’s not uncommon to have tens of seconds or minutes with no connectivity. ARC is designed to cope with this in most scenarios.

My common test case is 50-100mi bike rides, and it’s been solid for me, even in a hilly semi-rural area with a lot of line of sight interruptions. It buffers a fair amount ahead when the connection is good, so you can survive the weak spots.

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Thanks for that input. I was wondering how ARC would compare to Roon Remote with regards to buffering. Might have to punch a hole in the firewall to test it out.

I’ve been using a VPN to access my Roon Core while out and about (using Wireguard). It was finicky though. I have to agree with @brian, ARC is much more stable than attempting to stream full-size files over a 5G network. Too much latency.

I tested ARC today and it streamed flawlessly. Updated my endpoints and Roon apps at home without issue.