Roon ARC causing unexpected high battery usage (ref#HQM60V)

Support
1

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

· ARC is burning a hole in my pocket

Tell us about your home network

· TPlink managed network

2

The new version of ARC is a big improvement. It seems to run fine when I’m just using it on my iPhone with headphones. But when I’m in the car using Apple CarPlay, it runs the battery down very fast and the iPhone gets very warm.

3

Hi @HeavyMetalDrummer,

Thanks for the report.

Roon 2.74 contained an overhaul of CarPlay integration, so we’ll need to confirm if this behavior is related to those changes.

We’ve enabled verbose logging for ARC on your account. At your convenience, please:

  1. reboot Roon Server two times to enable the additional log layer

  2. similarly, close and reopen the ARC app itself two times

  3. reproduce the issue whenever you’re next using the app in the car

Logs will automatically reach our server showing the app’s resource consumption and any thermal throttling from the OS. This will help us pinpoint the offending process.

When this happens, are you listening to streaming service music, local music, or local downloads on the phone? Do you have any DSP applied? What about your quality settings in ARC (original quality, balanced, etc)?

We’ll watch for your response. Thank you!

4

Thanks for the quick reply. I’ll do the reboots tonight and use ARC in the car tomorrow morning.
Today, I used both a Qobuz playlist, and then a local file playlist. First drive was about 15 minutes on the qobuz playlist. Second was about 30 min on the local playlist. Just volume leveling and headroom adjustment. Balanced playback. Both times the phone was very hot within a couple of minutes. Battery ran down by about 50%.

5

I did the reboots and restarts last night. Used ARC with headphones during my walk this morning, seemed fine. Took two 15 minute car rides and both times the phone got hot and battery drained down significantly.

6

Thanks @HeavyMetalDrummer. We should have these events in logs, which are current uploading to our cloud diagnostics servers.

We’ll review these with development and share a next step shortly here once we’ve pinned down a cause or have a workaround.

7

Hi @HeavyMetalDrummer,

We’ve found the cause and we’re testing a fix in Early Access here:

If you’d like to test an Early Access build that includes the fix, please migrate to EA on both your server and ARC. Try to reproduce the conditions during the drive that were causing the battery drain and thermal problems.

Let us know if you’re willing to test that out, and we’ll enable (yet another) layer of diagnostic logging that will capture events in more granular detail.

Thank you!