· Roon ARC: Android system media controls in notification tray are often missing, out of sync, or inert
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I'd like to be able to control ARC playback via the play/pause/skip buttons in the notification tray on Android. Sometimes this works, but more often than not, the buttons don't do anything, and tapping the notification itself doesn't even open ARC. Sometimes the information displayed there is incorrect (i.e. a song that I'm no longer playing), and sometimes the notification is just missing entirely.
While testing this out as I write this, I actually ran into a much worse issue: tapping the Play/Pause button in the notification starts playback _on top of_ whatever else is already playing within ARC. I had two (or maybe even three) instances of the same song playing at once, and the only way I could figure out to stop it was by force-quitting the app.
Thanks for laying out the behavior so clearly. That extra detail about the notification controls starting playback on top of an existing stream is especially useful.
Does this happen only in Roon ARC, or does it also happen in the regular Roon app on Android? We would also like to know the Android version and the device manufacturer and model.
Thanks for the detailed follow-up, and for confirming it’s ARC-specific, that narrows things considerably. The behavior you’re describing, where Play/Pause starts a second stream on top of what’s already going, points at something more specific than a flaky notification, so I’d like to get a few things from you to hand our team a clear picture.
Starting with the quickest one: the next time it happens, could you grab a screenshot of your notification shade before doing anything else? I want to see whether there’s one ARC notification or two. That single detail tells us a lot about what’s going wrong underneath.
Two quick things to try in the meantime, since either could be contributing:
Go to Settings → Apps → Roon ARC → Battery and set it to Unrestricted, then see whether the notification behaves better over a day or so. Android’s battery management can shut down ARC’s background playback service in a way that leaves the notification out of sync.
If you have another Android device on hand running an older OS version, it would help enormously to know whether the same ARC build misbehaves there too. Android 17 is new enough that we need to rule out an OS-side change to media controls before we go looking at our own playback code.
Finally, the most useful single thing you could send us is an Android bug report captured right after a reproduction:
Enable Settings → System → Developer options, then tap Take bug report and choose Full report
Reproduce the duplicate-playback issue first, then capture the report within a minute or two, the underlying system log is a rolling buffer and older entries get overwritten quickly
The resulting file is fairly large and does contain some device information, so please share it via our private uploader below:
I’m realizing I probably should have filed a separate issue for the duplicate playback bug, as it only started happening recently, whereas the flaky notification bug has been happening for a long time (probably at least a year). If I run into the playback bug again, I’ll capture an Android bug report and let you know; for now I’d like to focus on the notification bug.
Android’s battery management can shut down ARC’s background playback service in a way that leaves the notification out of sync
Based on ref#PTMR1B, it seems like ARC has had trouble with Android’s battery management for a while. If that is also the cause of this issue, then I would hope it serves as further evidence of the need for a fix in that area. I would prefer not to put ARC in unrestricted battery mode because it ends uo consuming a lot of battery (perhaps another issue). Are you able to confirm whether this issue has the same underlying cause as the intermittent playback bug I referenced?
I don’t have any other Android devices to test with, unfortunately.
