Roon ARC Bluetooth Resume Issue with Android Devices (ref#LLBMPM)

[Ghislain]

Hi! What’s not quite right with Roon?

· None of the above quite fits

None of the above quite fits

· App interface looks or behaves oddly

Tell us what's going on

· Arc won't resume playing from a bluetooth headset (or car) after successfully pausing.

I've been having this issue for a while now and I can see that I'm not the only one (https://community.roonlabs.com/t/playback-not-resuming-in-car-via-bluetooth-with-arc-music-player-ref-69liad/274259/6 for example). Sometimes it does work but that's quite random and probably less than 20% of the time. I have experienced the same issue with many versions of Arc (all on Android) and several bluetooth headsets / IEM of various brands + from my car that's also accessing Arc through bluetooth connection to my phone.

Basically: I'm playing Arc tracks on my phone and listening on a bluetooth device that has play/pause ability. Pausing works, resuming doesn't.

I haven't experienced the same issue with any other app that's playing media on my phone.

Tell us about your home network

· Roon server is plugged to my router on ethernet. I have a very fast and stable network access.

[alex_h (Alex)]

Hello @Ghislain ,

Thanks for reaching out to us.

We are currently experiencing this type of problem due to scheduled maintenance by one of our providers, Cloudflare.

We recommend familiarizing yourself with this post and trying to retry a little later once the maintenance is complete.

We apologize for this inconvenience and are grateful for your understanding.

Thanks.

[Ghislain]

Hello @alex_h

Thanks for replying!

I read through the post you linked but it doesn’t seem related, I’ve been having the issue I’m describing for a long time (well over a year) and it seems purely coincidental that I submitted a report just at the time of the cloudflare issue.

Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help you figure it what is going on.

[connor]

Hi @Ghislain,

Apologies for the confusion.

Just to clarify, does this occur in both cases below?

1. switching from the BT headset to the BT car connection

2. switching from the BT car connection to the BT headset

As in, you have a hard time resuming playback on any Bluetooth device?

[Ghislain]

Hi @connor

Thanks for taking the time to respond. Mostly the following uses cases are the ones I struggle with:

1. Arc is playing on my Android phone connected to a BT headset.
   I press pause on the headset => music does pause.
   I then press play on the headset => music does not resume, I have to press play directly on the Arc interface on the phone to resume playing (and it then successfully resumes on the headset).
2. Exact same case and issue with the BT connection to my car instead of BT headset.

So yes, same issue on any BT device.

I can also confirm that I can successfully play/pause/resume from my BT headset (or car) when I use any media app other than Arc (e.g. Tidal, or Pocket Casts) on the same phone.

More specifically about the 2 cases you described: I haven’t noticed issues when switching between car and headset but that’s really not something I commonly do. I can test it out if that helps you diagnose the issue?

[Ghislain]

Hello there, just adding a reply to the thread to keep it from closing from inactivity. Thanks for looking into it

[benjamin]

Thanks for your ongoing patience here @Ghislain!

When you hit “play” on a headset, the Bluetooth device sends a signal to the Android OS. The OS then looks for the “Active Media Session” to pass that command to. If ARC has gone “stale” in the background or isn’t properly asserting itself as the active session, the command hits a dead end.

Android is notorious for “putting apps to sleep” to save battery, which often kills the background listener for Bluetooth commands.

• Long-press the ARC icon > App Info.
• Go to Battery or Battery usage.
• Ensure it is set to "Unrestricted". (Do not use "Optimized").

With that, recent Android versions have a specific setting for which apps are allowed to “resume” playback.

• Go to Settings > Sound & Vibration > Media.
• Look for "Pin media player" or "Show media recommendations." Toggle these on.
• Ensure ARC is toggled ON in the list of apps allowed to persist in the media quick-settings.

Lastly, it may be worth resetting your Bluetooth devices. If you’re able to perform any sort of factory reset, followed by re-establishing a fresh connection to your mobile device, let me know if this helps.

Thank you!

[Ghislain]

Thanks @benjamin for your help!

None of the options you listed worked but somehow your message gave me further clues on what to look up and eventually I got the problem fixed, which is great. Here’s what did work in case this can help someone at some point:

On my phone I have the (Samsung) Sound Assistant app installed, which provides advanced options for sound and media apps management on Samsung devices. One option is “Favorite media app” and I had at some point selected Roon in that menu, hoping it would help with better integration of the Roon app in the Android system (e.g. ability to use the Google Assistant to start tracks on Roon). Well that didn’t work I was under the wrong impression that it didn’t have any effect, but disabling that option yesterday fixed my Arc BT issue.

Problem solved then. Thank you again!