Roon ARC battery draining much faster than any other music player

[Bas_B]

Hi there,

First, context:
My phone: OnePlus 8T, running Android 14. DSP (MUSE) is completely turned off (EQ, Headphone EQ, Crossfeed, Volume leveling, Balance , DSD, Headroom management, all off, Sample rate conversion on ‘For Compatibility Only’)
Roon server runs in a Docker container on my home server, which runs on Linux Debian (actually, CasaOS).

The battery drains really fast when I am using Roon ARC to listen to music. Not doing anything else on the phone, just listening to music, screen turned off. I don’t know about idle, when I don’t use an app I just ‘close’ it. It’s worse when the music is downloaded than when streaming. But even when just streaming it’s just way too high. With music downloaded the phone would feel hot, when streaming it doesn’t feel hot. I used to use Musicolet to play music locally (flac files) from my phone and it just lasts way, way longer. The battery must drain at least 3 to 4x as fast in Roon ARC, compared to Musicolet. When listening to local music via Musicolet, it costs less than 10% battery after a few hours. Today, after listening for a few hours the battery went down by 40%. I have reinstalled Roon ARC at least twice, but that had no effect.

It’s such a shame because for the most part Roon works really well for me at home, but Roon ARC is almost completely unusable.

I don’t know if this is related: when I downloaded my playlist (3230 tracks right now) earlier, it would go up to 100% but it would never finish and it wouldn’t show up in ‘Your downloads’. I would retry it a few times, it would show it downloading, then it would disappear, then it would download again until eventually it gave up, from what it looked like. But I have no idea, because it won’t give me any more detail than ‘it’s downloading’.

Honestly, I wish I could just download the music to some specified folder on my phone and play it with another app. But now I’ve spend a few days (!) trying to find a way to “sync” my Roon playlist (singular, it gets way too complex having multiple playlists) with my phone, with flac files.

I found many of topics about this, but no real solutions. Some of them say it’s better in a newer version, but all these threads are from some time ago, so it doesn’t seem to have been fixed. This is probably the most helpful thread:
Roon Arc impact on phone battery life - #20 by ChrisA → User suggests it has to do with downloaded music. I have also noticed it’s worse when music is downloaded (and as I said, the phone gets hot). But even when no music is downloaded, it drains way too fast. And I really want to have music available offline for moments I don’t have any internet.

Battery Drain issues solved? UPDATE: Still high GPU draw on Now Playing screen - #4 by mackid1993 → Suggests to turn off DSP (which I did, didn’t fix the issue)
B181 ARC battery drain on Android → Suggests turning off “disabling background data”, I have already turned off “Allow background activity”
[ARC] Idle Battery Drain Issue on Android 14 (ref#36KAR0) → Concludes that it’s being worked on and a fix is in early access. This was August 2024, it’s now July 2025.
ARC/Android: Hot Phone During Downloading/Playback of Downloaded Tracks [Investigating] - #7 by Chikolad → Suggests switching the Roon server to early access, that was February 2024.
https://www.reddit.com/r/roonlabs/comments/15sr9s9/very_high_battery_drain_whilst_using_roon_arc/ → No solution offered, this was 2 years ago.
https://www.reddit.com/r/roonlabs/comments/xq42vh/roon_arc_is_causing_phone_to_get_warmhot_also/ → Suggests that this is due to ‘pre caching’, which should be done after a while. I have been using Roon ARC for about 3 weeks now.

I really want Roon ARC to work well without draining my battery.

Here’s a screenshot of the battery usage, look at how steep the curve is today (all those steep parts are me listening to music) compared to yesterday, when I was not using Roon ARC):

Thank you in advance!

Bas

[Bas_B]

Hi there, it’s been a while since I posted the topic. There hasn’t been a single reply. Is there any update about this? Or thoughts from anyone from Roon? Thank you.

[Geoff_Coupe]

If the post was intended as feedback to Roon Labs, then it should have been posted in Feedback - which is closely monitored by Roon Labs staff and they read all the posts there. I should point out that Roon Labs very rarely comment directly on posts, but they do read them.

I’ve moved this thread to the Feedback category of the forum to ensure that they will see your post.

[Bas_B]

Okay, thank you!

[Bas_B]

I don’t suppose replying to this thread bumps it, but I’ll try it anyway. Recently I saw that the latest Roon ARC update (1.70) says: “Improved ARC performance to reduce battery usage”. I got very excited and updated the server and and apps right away. I’ve been using it for a while now, although not very for long at a time. My first impression was that things have indeed improved! The phone wasn’t getting hot anymore (only slightly warm), and the battery draining wasn’t as apparent.

But I decided to run a little test. The test was to run Roon ARC, playing an album for 1 hour. I made sure the album was longer than 1 hour, and the files are hosted locally (on my home server). The screen was off and I turned down the sound, but made sure it still played. Before every test I would charge the phone to 80%, start the app and let it play. For all 3, once I had started the app the battery would be at 79%. I compared: Roon ARC while streaming, Roon ARC with downloaded files, and Musicolet with FLAC files on the phone. The same files, obviously. These are the results:

Roon ARC, FLAC files streamed from server (no download), screen off:
0 min: 79%
30 min: 74%
60 min: 69%

Roon ARC, FLAC files downloaded, screen off:
0 min: 79%
30 min: 74%
60 min: 69%

Musicolet, local FLAC files on the phone, screen off:
0 min: 79%
30 min: 77%
60 min: 75%

So as you can see, both times playing music via Roon ARC decreased the battery about 10% for 1 hour of playing. For Musicolet this was 4%. I think this is still a big difference. I don’t expect it to be perfect, but if Roon ARC would have cost about 6% battery I would have considered it good enough, I think. With these results however, it means that I can play music with Roon ARC for about 10 hours before the phone is completely drained from 100% (and not using it for anything else), while for Musicolet this is 25 hours.

Of course I have no idea what Roon ARC does in the background to cause this, and how it differs from Musicolet. Honestly, if I could just download the original files through the Roon ARC app and play them with Musicolet, it would make life much much easier already. So I wish I could provide more information, to help, and if there is any way I can, please let me know.