· Roon Arc connecting to Android Auto wirelessly audio issues. After play has begun, the audio for Arc only will mute while the track continues to play. If I pull up the Tidal app or anything else that produces audio, that app will play it's audio and then you can hear Arc again. Pausing Tidal for instance, will then keep the Arc audio coming through for about 10 minutes, where it will then again "mute" itself. I've not had this happen at all using the phones speakers, a Bluetooth speaker connected to the phone. It only seems to occur when trying to use Android Auto. My phone is a Pixel 10 Pro XL. To summarize, no other audio app has this issue from my phone to the same car unit. This is only affecting Roon Arc. I've also already disabled Android auto play of music, what verified this happens regardless of the source audio file. It seems like Arc is unable to focus the audio correctly.
Hey @Phillip_Pratt, welcome to the community, and thanks for laying out the behavior so clearly.
What you’re describing sounds specific to Android Auto’s audio focus handling on the Pixel, especially since Roon ARC behaves normally on the phone speaker and over Bluetooth. To get a clearer picture, we’d like to enable diagnostics on your account first, then the next time it mutes, please note the exact local time, date, and what was playing, and let us know here so we can review that window.
In the meantime, two things would help narrow this down:
Is your Roon Server connected to the network over Ethernet or WiFi?
Is Android Auto wired, or using a wireless adapter or built-in wireless connection to the car unit?
Is it a proprietary car implementation or 3rd party unit?
If you can also tell us the car head unit model, we can compare that side of the chain as well. Once we have the timestamp and those details, we can dig in further.
· I mistakenly allowed my previous issue to close. This is to get that going again. Here is my original report: Roon Arc connecting to Android Auto wirelessly audio issues. After play has begun, the audio for Arc only will mute while the track continues to play. If I pull up the Tidal app or anything else that produces audio, that app will play it's audio and then you can hear Arc again. Pausing Tidal for instance, will then keep the Arc audio coming through for about 10 minutes, where it will then again "mute" itself. I've not had this happen at all using the phones speakers, a Bluetooth speaker connected to the phone. It only seems to occur when trying to use Android Auto. My phone is a Pixel 10 Pro XL. To summarize, no other audio app has this issue from my phone to the same car unit. This is only affecting Roon Arc. I've also already disabled Android auto play of music, what verified this happens regardless of the source audio file. It seems like Arc is unable to focus the audio correctly.
Here is the techs response: Hey @Phillip_Pratt, welcome to the community, and thanks for laying out the behavior so clearly.
What you’re describing sounds specific to Android Auto’s audio focus handling on the Pixel, especially since Roon ARC behaves normally on the phone speaker and over Bluetooth. To get a clearer picture, we’d like to enable diagnostics on your account first, then the next time it mutes, please note the exact local time, date, and what was playing, and let us know here so we can review that window.
In the meantime, two things would help narrow this down:
Is your Roon Server connected to the network over Ethernet or WiFi? Is Android Auto wired, or using a wireless adapter or built-in wireless connection to the car unit? Is it a proprietary car implementation or 3rd party unit?
If you can also tell us the car head unit model, we can compare that side of the chain as well. Once we have the timestamp and those details, we can dig in further.
Here are my answers to those questions: The Roon Server is connected over Ethernet. Android Auto is using the built-in wireless connection to the car unit. It's a OEM unit, BMW.
I’ve merged your new thread into the old one so that we have all the info in one place. Can you please share with us the exact local time + artist/track when this issue next occurs? Thanks!
You have our apologies for the delay in responding to your issue. We’re having difficulty accessing diagnostic mode for Arc surrounding your device, and therefore we haven’t been able to review the timestamp you provided in your previously reply.
A few troubleshooting steps to try in the meantime:
Isolate wireless Android Auto vs. the phone itself. Connect via a USB cable for a session instead of wireless AA. If the mute-after-~10-minutes pattern disappears on wired, that strongly implicates the wireless AA audio session/keep-alive behavior rather than Roon ARC's own playback pipeline.
Test with another long-form streaming app over the same wireless AA link. See if you can play a podcast or audiobook app (something with a similarly "continuous single audio stream" pattern, not track-based) over the same BMW wireless AA connection for 15+ minutes.
Rule out car-side profile switching. BMW's wireless CarPlay/AA implementations sometimes drop to a different audio profile after a period of "no new focus event." Try the trick of manually toggling media mute/unmute from the car's own AA screen when it goes silent, rather than switching to Tidal.
Version/cache check. Confirm your Android Auto app version and whether Google Play services / Android Auto have pending updates, and clear Android Auto's cache/data once to see if that helps.
We’ve discussed this with our senior QA and development teams. The team is investigating some possibilities here and, as soon as that investigation is complete, we’ll be sure to follow up ASAP.
You have our apologies for the trouble here, and we’ve greatly appreciated your patience as we continue investigating this tricky issue. We’ll be in touch as soon as we can.
After a road trip in a different vehicle that is Android Auto wired only this past week, I had a similar issue but different. In this case audio would not start initially sometimes after connecting to the vehicle. This again was only with Roon Arc and other audio apps were unaffected. In this case though I was able to get audio to start only after, having first connected the device to Android Auto then force stopping the Roon Arc app. After starting the app again, it would play just fine for the duration of the drive and have to be redone again after starting the vehicle again.
Thanks for testing that in another vehicle and for the clear details.
We don’t have any additional information to share, unfortunately. Progress is likely to be slower than we’d like on this issue, but we’ll be sure to keep you in the loop if and when there is movement.
I’m glad to hear you were at least able to get music playing after a fairly simple workaround.
