Roon ARC app unable to download songs despite available storage (ref#1IHVXB)

[andrea.carcani]

Hi! What’s not quite right with Roon?

· None of the above quite fits

None of the above quite fits

· None of these quite match

Tell us what's going on

· In the Roon ARC app on android I am unable to download songs as it says I have no storage left (I have 8GB free on my phone and I am trying to download 500MB of data). It is quite annoying, also I can't seem to download specific songs, only entire album are allowed, which I also find quite strange.

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· Zyxel T-54

[Wade_Oram]

@andrea.carcani

(I have 8GB free on my phone and I am trying to download 500MB of data)

Is this the amount of storage left on the phone or is it the amount of storage remaining from the allocated Roon ARC storage pool? The two are different.

If the former, you may have hit the limit imposed by the latter. In this case, you can increase the amount of storage available to Roon ARC in the Roon ARC Settings towards the bottom (scroll down until you come to the ‘DOWNLOADS’ section of the settings).

[andrea.carcani]

Hello Wade,
Thanks a lot for the quick reply.
5GB is the free space on my phone storage. This is what I see in the download section of the app:

The only thing I see as configurable is “smart downloads”, but that’s not what I am looking for. I would just like to be able to download songs ad-hoc.

Thanks!

[vadim]

Hello @andrea.carcani,

Thanks for the clarification and for the screenshot — that helps a lot.

There are two separate things going on here, both of which are expected behavior on Android:

“No storage left” despite free space on the phone**

On Android, the “free space” shown by the system is not fully available to apps.

Even if your phone reports ~5–8 GB free, Android:

• Reserves a portion of internal storage for the OS, caches, and system stability
• Actively prevents apps from writing large files once free space drops below a certain threshold

In practice, this means:

• With ~5 GB free, Android may still deny ARC permission to download, even for a 500 MB file
• This is a system-level restriction, not something ARC can override

As a rule of thumb, for reliable ARC downloads on Android you’ll want:

• At least 8–10 GB of genuinely free space on the device

This explains why ARC reports no available storage even though the phone technically isn’t “full”.

Downloading individual songs vs full albums (current ARC design)

At the moment, Roon ARC does not support ad-hoc downloads of individual tracks.

Downloads in ARC are intentionally limited to:

• Full albums
• Playlists
• Smart Downloads (automatic, based on listening behavior)

As a workaround, I can suggest creating a specific playlist for ARC downloading and adding the tracks that you want to move to the ARC there.

This is by design and not a bug. The goal is to ensure reliable offline playback and consistent metadata handling, especially when switching between online/offline states.

If you’d like to request support for single-track downloads, I’d strongly recommend posting in Feedback > Feature Suggestions on the Roon Community — that’s the best way for the product team to gauge interest and prioritize future improvements.

Let us know if you have any questions