Roon ARC crashes with iFi DACs on Samsung S24+ (ref#LWIG60)

[David_Brennan]

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

· Roon arc crashing with ifi dacs, gobar and idsd micro. Samsung S24+ external USB dac. arc is flawless to android auto and my Bluetooth hearing aids. But when I plug in one of my USB dacs it is very unstable. I have USB audio player which works great to access qobuz. Which would perhaps lead to an issue with arc? That's also what the crash error mgs said. Something about needing an arc update. All software is up to date per playstore. Any ideas? Thanks

Tell us about your home network

· Roon arc is cellular. Home is tplink deco mesh Xe75. Roon is ethernet hard wired running on a NUC. Arc works fine except with usb dacs conned to my s24+. Usb dacs work with usb audio player

[noris]

Hi @David_Brennan,

Thanks for the details. Since Roon ARC is working fine on cellular, Android Auto, and your Bluetooth hearing aids, the next thing we want to check is whether the same behavior shows up in the regular Roon app on the S24+.

Does the same issue happen there when you use the iFi DACs, or is this isolated to Roon ARC? Can you please share the exact local time + date + track when the issue occurs? We’ll enable and look over diagnostics for that time-frame.

[David_Brennan]

Been playing around tonight. At the bottom of this growing stream of words I’ve narrowed the cause of the crash. I’ll leave everything here so you can follow my trouble shooting

Hi, thanks for the quick reply. 4:47 pm pacific time Monday. I just tried arc, it plays through the dac but volume control is the phone not the dac. Once I toggle the “usb dac, beta” switch it starts crashing. When working it also downsamples to 48kHz, like android does. Roon plays through the USB dac but down samples to 48kHz and volume control is the phone. Neither roon nor arc will play through the dac at hi-res. Dac can handle 192 and dsd 128. Side note, when I plug the dac into the phone I get a pop up asking which app do I want to use the dac. Two options are given, ARC or usb audio player. Roon itself is not an option. Roon will play through both dacs through a Raspberry PI over wifi but not the phone usb dac. Hope that helps.

Later that evening… I played around further. I ignored the pop-up that appears when I plug in the USB dac. USB audio finds the dac and asks if it should use it. It then plays bit rate of source. Arc and roon don’t notice the dac in any pop-up and just play 48kHz. the stream on roon shows AAudio on output no mention of ifi dac. On arc it shows ifi dac for the output device but the stream is up/down sampled to 48kHz.
I just tried qobuz on the phone. I found a 192kHz album. The dac shows it’s playing at 192kHz.

So… qobuz and usb audio player both find the ifi dac and play at the source bit rate (confirmed by the dac). Roon and arc downsample to 48kHz(per the app confirmed by the dac) . Arc attempts to play hi res when the “usb dac beta” is toggled on but quickly crashes. I uninstalled and reinstalled arc. No change.

Looks like my phone and dac play nice with qobuz and usb audio player, seamlessly. Unfortunately roon and arc do not . It’s a mystery for sure. Let me know if you need anything more. Zoom call to share my screen? Thanks David

Still trouble shooting… I tried arc on my Samsung S11 tablet. Plugged in the ifi dac and it works. Even upsamples the file and I can EQ. The phone used to do this. Roon just plays 48kHz through the dac on the S11 tablet.

Further find, it’s been a long evening . I set ARC upsampling to “for compatibility only”, it plays at the source material bit rate. I can use muse for everything except “upsampling”. Once ARC starts upsampling it crashes. It will play, at upsampled rateuntil I leave the app (check mail, etc or go to home screen). When I return to the app, ARC, I can restart it(play) unless it has crashed. If it crashes I need to reopen and set upsampling to “ compatibility only” to get it playing again. Time to stop playing and just listen to the music. Thanks for your help…

[David_Brennan]

Looks like there is a conflict between my S24+ and roon ARC upsampling. Probably going to be very difficult to find. I’ve reinstalled the apps. I’ll leave it as hopeless unless you have any ideas…

[benjamin]

Thanks for all the troubleshooting you’ve tried so far @David_Brennan!

The core issue looks like a memory/resource crash when ARC’s upsampling engine is running in the background on the S24+. Samsung’s aggressive app lifecycle management (battery optimization) is a strong suspect; it may be killing or throttling ARC’s audio processing thread when it goes to the background.

Things worth trying next:

1. Disable battery optimization for ARC specifically — go to Settings → Apps → Roon ARC → Battery → set to "Unrestricted." Samsung's One UI is notoriously aggressive here and it's a very common cause of audio app crashes on background.
2. Check Developer Options → "Don't keep activities" — if this is on, turn it off. It forces apps to restart every time you leave them.
3. Try a different USB audio mode — in Developer Options, look for "USB audio routing" or similar. Some S24+ units have a setting that forces audio through the system mixer rather than exclusive mode, which would explain why UAPP bypasses it fine (UAPP requests exclusive access differently).
4. Test with "Screen pinning" / keeping ARC in foreground — if ARC stays stable while upsampling as long as you don't leave the app, confirming it's a background-kill issue would point squarely at battery optimization.

Thank you

[David_Brennan]

Hi Benjamin,

One or multiple of the items on your list appears to have fixed the problem! Rock solid so far.

Once again the Roon team has delighted me! I honestly didn’t expect a solution. Thanks so much.

I’m retired (16 years now) but used to manage a tech support line for Broadcom/avago/HP. I really appreciate good support and know how difficult it can be to provide. Once again thank you so much!

David

[noris]

Hi @David_Brennan,

Great to hear one or more of those steps appears to have done the trick, and that ARC is rock solid so far. We’re glad we could help get this sorted. Enjoy your music, and we’ll go ahead and mark this thread for closure.