Roon ARC + Carplay: Share your thoughts and road listening adventures here!

Roon Software Discussion
#65

Many thanks, everyone, for your feedback!

For those of you who have experienced difficulty getting CarPlay going, please start a thread in support and be sure to fill out our support template as thoroughly as possible when describing your issue. Full issues details are the golden ticket to helping us clear away the snags efficiently. Without them, we have to play ping-pong with your issue report to gather those details. That only delays resolving your problem. Neither you nor the support folks want that.

We appreciate your continued enthusiasm and positive reception for Roon ARC + CarPlay. More exciting things lie ahead! :boom:

1 Like
#66

First of all
Carplay is awesome, thanks for these improvements, bit I’m missing some important features

  • I need a search option: An A-Z and/or search function is needed. Now the artists and albums are sorted by your settings in the app, but standard this is alphabetically: result my artists are available up to B, all the others are omitted…
  • In the Album / Artist / Track list now everything gets sorted on the sort option you provided in the app (but on car play its not possible to change the sorting rules from alphabetically to most played for instance) This is only changeable on the app on the phone, not in carplay
  • love/ban option would be nice
  • Are there plans to include the internet radio streams in ARC? I hate the sound artefacts in the dab streams :slight_smile:
  • I noticed that the last added/ last played screens in ARC are not in sync with Roon , they display other albums
  • I also noticed the freeze when switching between wifi (in front of the house ave then switching to 4g, kill app and restart fixes this most of the time
  • The transcoding of large files flac (600 mb mix for instance) in 48khz still gives issues on transcode to lossy on 4g, it’s only with large files. The mix will play for several minutes, then freezes. Small tracks of couple of minutes in flac 48 don’t have this problem (i’ll try to test this much further and give more feedback)

I use carplay with usb cable and use the touch screen of the car, now playing etc all works fine.

#67

Well I am able to see ARC in CarPlay and I can play downloaded playlists no problem. That is nice. The problem I am experiencing so far is that I cannot stream anything from my Nucleus+ core. I can see that ARC has the blue check indicating that is properly connected to the core. If I try to listen to a playlist not downloaded or albums in my collection, or really anything streamed I get error messages about the connection. I live in metro DC so there is not really a problem with wireless connections. I do notice while I am driving that signals switch from LTE to 5G etc but I would have thought that ARC would have been programmed to handle those sorts of switches. Anyway I am a bit frustrated because the ARC concept is really great but, so far, the implementation seems to be lacking. Or is there something I am missing?

#68

Hi, I’m thrilled about this release! I signed up for Roon on the day ARC was announced based on the promise of CarPlay support and now it’s here :slight_smile: The ability to hear my ripped LPs in high quality via CarPlay is a key use case for me.

A few observations / wishlist items:

Overall the reliability and performance has been really great. I’ve found it solid so far and zippy to navigate, cover art is not delayed or staggered like I’ve seen in other apps. No crashes, no glitches so far. Great job!

The main enhancements I’d like to see are around the Downloads.

In the Downloads page can you please split the downloads into Recently Downloaded, Playlists, Artist, Albums, Composer, etc… A great example of this is how Apple Music in CarPlay handles Downloads. This capability would also be really helpful in the Roon ARC phone iOS version.

It would also be great to know visually which albums have been downloaded when looking at albums or playlists, there is an indicator on the Roon phone iOS version on the cover art which is helpful. On CarPlay I’ve seen some apps indicate this on the album with a cloud or download indicator on the far right of the album banner after the name, so the album line shows left to right (1) the cover art (2) name (3) indicator.

This would be really helpful for navigating the albums and deciding on what to play in the car. Due to the limitations on bandwidth and bandwidth cost, I prefer to choose to play the albums that are downloaded.

One more feature which is really helpful when driving is to use “letters” when scrolling a long list of elements (artists, albums, songs, etc…). Apple Music has a very slick implementation of this, when you quickly scroll it assumes that you are trying to move a great distance on the list so it pops up a letter chooser making it easy to get over to elements starting with the chosen letter (“M” for example). It’s hard to explain, but if you have access to Apple Music on CarPlay then you can see a good example of this. It’s an excellent UX feature and I know many of the Roon users have large libraries!

Thanks again for support CarPlay and I’m eagerly looking forward to updates and improvements!

3 Likes
#69

It works mostly though it’s pretty slow. I have the same problem as others, the album cover doesn’t change in the now playing screen.

#70

Here you go - this worked for me

#71

CarPlay app is working quite well. Had a bit of some hiccups but it worked well. It’s pretty clean interface and not messy like Apple Music. Here are some suggestions:

  1. Maybe some sort of search (I know Siri would be a pain to integrate).

  2. Maybe a way to add tracks (not sure if it’s possible)

I’ll test further and see what I can come up with.

#72

I have the same issue as Stormwulf. ARC is not showing any album / playlist art or if art shows it is likely mismatched in my late model GMC pickup via USB. Audio plays but screen controls are iffy.

1 Like
#73

Vote for it here: Bookmarks on Roon arc

#74

Technically worked well for me but album art was stuck on the wrong pic.

#75

Yes, I’d also very much welcome a search function!

#76

I have now tested Roon ARC in my car and I can say that the sound with the CarPlay enhancement is NOT as good as it was before. Voices are less refined and the treble is not as sharp, with the bass a tad more bloated (not as tight). Now people will say this is not possible, but I do a great deal of critical listening and I have to agree with Ricardo. I have not touched ANY settings on my iPhone or in my Peugeot GT Sport console.

Any explanation Roon Support ?

#77

There should be a peugeot application present among the carplay applications which allows access to the sound settings of the car. In my Mercedes it is anyway.

#78

It has nothing to do with the car settings … the sound is quite different from what it is before. I know that the Peugeot has sound settings but this does not overcome what is lost.

#79

I have tested Roon ARC in my car with the CarPlay.
When I search in my library artists or albums, by scrolling in standard alphabetical order, the scrolling search stops, and won’t show my full list of artists and albums.
When i choose an artist, it wont show me all the albums of the artist i have in my library (it shows only 4 or 5 albums).
Any idea what the problem is?

1 Like
#80

yes, it hadn’t shown up in CarPlay settings previously. it finally did today.

#81

I think sound quality is limited by Apple in the CarPlay app, nothing that Roon will be able to change.

How was you using it before the app?

#82

Hey, thanks for reporting. This shouldn’t be the case.

Could you please put in a support ticket with as much detail as you can offer? Particularly interested to know: what device you’re using with ARC, what streaming quality settings you have, and what streaming services you’re using to try and play music. Keep us posted.

#83

So Apple, for safety reasons deliberately makes Carplay restrictive in terms of what we can show users. The idea is to keep options brief and effective to reduce distractions for drivers. As such, we can only show so many items on a given page, and when you’re vehicle is in motion, the limit becomes much shorter, like 12-15. So unfortunately, this is an Apple thing.

#84

I tried ARC on Carplay yesterday and it worked really well, but I can’t really use it to find what I want to play. The searching capabilities need a lot of work for it to be useable. Until these are added, I would need to use the ARC app on the phone:

  • Ability to zoom through the alphabet when scrolling through Artists. I would have to scroll through 1000 artists to get to Frank Zappa. You can do this easily in the Apple Music CarPlay app.

  • Show all of an artists’ albums rather than just four.

  • Show the Recently Added albums, because that’s what I would usually want to find. Showing Recently Played albums is kind of useless since I’ve already just listened to them.

  • Siri integration so I can just ask to play an artist or album or playlist

  • Ability to shuffle the items in a Tag

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