Using RoonARC on CarPlay with iPhone 13 ProMax running iOS 18.5, RoonARC v1.68.362. RoonServer running at home on WS2019 with v2.63, build 1544 production 64 bit. ARC constantly crashes before starting up a song, or within a minute, with the current version. The last ARC version worked flawlessly and versions before the last one crashed as the current one.
Describe your network setup
UniFi networking products. Xfinity Gigabit internet service. All very stable.
Thanks for writing in and for sharing your report!
Are you only seeing this with Arc? iOS 18.5 has been widely reported to cause instability and crashes in CarPlay environments, including symptoms like black screens, audio dropouts, and random app terminations, even for unrelated apps, so I’d be curious to know if experience this using any other audio app outside of Arc.
If you could, please reproduce the issue and share the specific date/time/ name of track attempted to play when the issue occurred - we’ll enable diagnostic mode for your server and Arc for further investigation.
Hi @benjamin . You are right about other unrelated app issues on CarPlay! Specifically, bringing up TIDAL nowadays only shows a black screen. I have to go open TIDAL on my iPhone to have it then properly appear in CarPlay. So, most interesting about iOS 18.5…
I am in my home just now and have put my phone on cellular only to simulate being outside the home. At 1.12p Central time, I attempted to play the song “All Your Love” by John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers. It played on the phone for 24 seconds before crashing (no CarPlay required). I started the app up again and it is frozen on that track at 24 seconds and I can’t restart it or pick another track or album.
At 1.15p, I restarted the app and it allowed me to select another album, being the new Billy Joel “And So It Goes” soundtrack. By the time I scrolled to the 100th track (an early “Piano Man” demo), the app froze and then a moment later, crashed away.
Let me know if that gives you enough diagnostics to work with. Thanks. JCR
Oddly enough, we’re not seeing any information around Arc being active from the most recent diagnostic report.
Do you have many downloaded tracks/albums on your phone? If not, it may be worth performing a fresh install of Arc and seeing if the crashing persists.
That is weird. So, as I have no downloaded items in RoonARC, I deleted and reinstalled.
Testing again here at home, but solely on cellular.
3.11p I have started up and playing the Piano Man track just now. I switched to And So It Goes and it continues to play. Switched again at 3.13p to the Bluesbreaker track. It’s also now playing without crash.
The reinstall seems to have helped. (I will go test in the car next.) New issue now. DSD 2ch source (Piano Man album) is being downconverted to 48kHz 256 kbps when I plug my Go Link Max into the iPhone. I’m trying to find the setting to fix this, but am not finding it.
Update. I had the auto rate switch enabled. I’ve turned that off and gone to Original Format for wifi and cellular. But although Muse says the go link max will do DSD128 and I have DSD Playback Strategy set at DSD over PCM, DSD64 is downconverting to PCM 352.8. So, still not quite there. Your input will be helpful! JCR
Further update: 7.13p and I’ve been driving around listening to RoonARC. So, it appears the reinstall solved the issue. I assume your diagnostics will confirm.
So, the remaining issue is the DSD playback matter above. Thanks, @benjamin . JCR
Another update: last night, my iPhone updated to iOS 18.6. All the issues reappeared this morning — crashing, freezing, black screen on CarPlay. So, taking a cue from above, I deleted the RoonARC yet again and reinstalled. Seems to gain be working. JCR
Thanks for the updates! I’ll pass along the info to our dev team in regaurds to the crashing after the most recent iOS update.
Did you get DSD playback to function properly prior to your recent issues?
Can you share a screenshot of your signal path when this is occurring? Generally, ARC is limited by iOS’s CoreAudio, which typically does not pass native DSD streams. That means even with DoP enabled, you’ll still see PCM 352.8 kHz output.
Very astute, @benjamin. I missed that one. And indeed, by disabling volume leveling, I’m getting lossless DoP playback of DSD.
So, to summarize this thread:
A reinstall of the Roon ARC app on the iPhone stopped the crashing of Roon ARC over CarPlay. This reinstall worked both when iOS 18.5 kept crashing and when, after the Roon ARC reinstall, my phone updated to iOS 18.6 and began crashing again.
My hope is that Roon can engineer a more robust solution than successive reinstalls.
Use of the go max pro as an iPhone dongle DAC and headphone amp does support DSD128 using DoP so long as volume leveling is shut off.
We’ve forwarded this to our QA team so they can attempt to reproduce the issue in-house and report their findings to the R&D team. We’ll post an update here if we’re able to reproduce it successfully.
Applying any sound enhancement requires converting from DSD to PCM, since DSD is a one-bit format and cannot be directly modified.
We apologize that this thread closed without resolution. Here’s the status: there is still an active investigation into this report, but our team has not yet been able to reproduce the symptom you’ve reported in-house at this time. W
Are you currently experiencing crashes when connected to CarPlay, or more broadly in the app? Please share the name of a track that was playing when ARC crashed (or an approximate date/time of the crash).
We’ll follow up promptly. Thank you again for your patience.
Thank you, @connor. Actually, ARC crashes on my iPhone without any CarPlay integration. For example, I am at home just now. I’ll turn cellular off on my iPhone and just use WiFi, which is very strong in our house.
I managed to scroll to the bottom of the home page, back up, selected the Art Blakey Free For All album, selected info about it, scrolled to the bottom and then, scrolling back up but before playing anything, ARC crashed and shut down.
I restarted ARC and did the same thing again with the Johnny Cash With His Hot and Blue Guitar, and same result.
I last had been listening to IGY by Donald Fagen. Since it was already mid-track, I just hit play. It ran for about two seconds and then ARC froze up. I restarted ARC and tried to play that track again. It froze after ten seconds and then ARC crashed and closed. Same result using just cellular with WiFi shut off.
I have Roon 2.62 build 1641 on my iPhone. No problem scrolling or playing tracks. Of course, that won’t work outside of home.
My issues continue on ARC 1.74.391 with Roon Server 2.62 build 1641 and iPhone 13 Pro Max with iOS 26.3.1.
Let me know if you need me to test anything else. Thanks. JCR
Thank you for the update and timestamps. You have my apologies here if this has already been tested, but I noticed your library is around 263k tracks, an impressive feat no doubt! That said, it’s right around the threshold of what our QA team is typically able to test.
If you haven’t yet, what happens if you create a fresh backup, then temporarily downsize your library to ~150k tracks, do you experience the same crashes?
Let me know if this is something you’d consider trying in the meantime. Thank you!
Hi @benjamin. To be clear, if I do a new backup now, move half my library out of the Roon folder, and then after testing, reinsert the removed tracks back into my Roon folder and do a restore from the new backup I do now, everything from history to recently played, etc. will return to the same as it is at right now? If yes, I’ll give it a shot.
And I do presume this is all about ARC, as I have no issues with my library at its size using Roon server across my home endpoints, correct?
Sorry for the delay here. You’re correct about how the Backup works. It essentially creates a snapshot of your server at a specific moment in time, capturing your library, play history, settings, zones, DSP customizations, and more. The only exception is streaming service content: if you’ve added or deleted new tracks or playlists to services like Qobuz or Tidal since the backup was made, Roon will still sync those items with your library once the backup is restored.
Roon has no problem with large libraries as long as the server machine has sufficient memory and processing power. The limitation is only with ARC; mobile phones, as hardware and software platforms, don’t support the scale of data transfer required for the accompanying images, metadata, etc. with libraries over about 200k.
