For Roon ARC on iOS connected with Tailscale, downloading music over Tailscale does not work.
ARC is connected to Roon Server and all functions except downloading appear to work — search, album art, and playback including of non-downloaded (streamed) files work fine.
Downloading state remains permanently stuck on “Downloading 0 of 1 item”. The download does not progress. Roon ARC storage consumption does not increase. Downloading works as expected when connected directly to the wifi with Roon Server.
I tried disabling requirement to download over wifi in case Tailscale over wifi was not considered wifi by ARC, and this did not change the behaviour. For below screenshot, the playlist was partially downloaded while connected to the same wifi as the Roon Server. The same behaviour occurs when downloading a playlist or an album.
Describe your network setup
iPhone connected to Roon Server Linux via Tailscale over wifi (different wifi from Roon Server)
Thank you for your report. We’ve identified the failure event in diagnostics and will escalate with development for a more precise next step. We’ll follow up here as soon as possible.
Thank you for your patience. We’ve investigated more closely with Development, and there are indications that bad track data associated with a particular item, Above & Beyond, OceanLab, Sirens of the Sea, might be contributing to the download failure.
Try either a) downloading completely different content from that which you are currently downloading to ARC or b) removing this single track object above. Does ARC continue to fail to download with other content?
Please let us know the results - we’ll be collecting diagnostics on our end to investigate further.
Hi Connor – As soon as I re-connected to my home wifi and opened Roon ARC app on my phone the downloads completed, without making any changes in Roon or to address the bad track data. Additionally Smart Downloads, which were enabled but not downloading while using wifi away from home, also immediately started working once connected to home wifi. There may be bad track data, but there is a definite difference in behaviour between being connected on my home wifi vs. being connected on another wifi + Tailscale.
Relating to the bad track data, I looked at the tags on all the files for that album and they seem fine – it’s just normal ones: ALBUM, ARTIST, CATALOGNUMBER, GENRE, PUBLISHER, TITLE, TRACK, YEAR, and no special characters or visible corruption of track metadata (when viewed with Roon “File tags” or Mp3tag macOS app).
I removed the album from Roon, ran library cleanup, and put the files back. The album looks the same as before in Roon and Roon ARC, with the same download behaviour: I’m not near a public wifi to test downloading with Roon ARC, but on 5G + Tailscale with “Download over wifi only” disabled I get the same behaviour as above. As soon as I joined the home wifi the download completed immediately. It may be some time before I am near a public wifi again to test.
Is there a difference that can be more directly related to Tailscale and downloads, like maybe that when downloading ARC does not try to connect to additional known IP addresses that may include the Tailscale 100.* IP, whereas other ARC functions (like searches) do try to connect to all known IP addresses?
Hi @Evan,
Tailscale is supposed to simulate your phone being in the same LAN as your Roon server no matter what network you are actually connected to. Since you are still seeing differences in behavior when your phone is outside of your home network I wonder if perhaps there is an issue with the settings of Tailscale. Are you seeing “Not Ready” in your server’s Roon ARC settings page as expected?
Additionally have you tested downloading other albums to see if the same problem happens?
ARC app shows Cloud and Roon Server connected over 5G + Tailscale. To try to troubleshoot further, I reset everything:
signed out of ARC
deleted the app
reinstalled the app
connected via 5G + Tailscale ONLY – no wifi.
The newly-installed ARC app connected with no issues over 5G + Tailscale, and shows Cloud and Roon Server connected.
Now I get different behaviour. Searching and album covers work, and downloading album Sirens of the Sea, another album, and a playlist all work.
Streaming (non-downloaded play) from my local library does not work now over 5G + Tailscale, getting a “Poor connection” error consistently, even though streaming worked previously fine and it was downloading that didn’t work. When I look in the Roon Server logs I don’t see any errors. I can see the song being requested and encoded into Opus, and then the encode finishes, but the song doesn’t play, and I get a “Poor connection” error after some time. When I retry downloading the song after it has already been re-encoded once, I see the request come in with “got playbackinfo” logged, but no playback and eventually “Poor connection”.
I don’t have a public wifi nearby to try with instead of 5G, but I just did a speedtest.net at over 160Mbps download, 30ms ping from my home ISP’s local speedtest.net server to my phone over 5G, so I don’t think there is a poor connection… When I first created this issue, I was on the other side of the planet and streaming worked under far worse conditions…
After finding reinstalling the iOS app changed behaviour, I also tried reinstalling Roon Server from scratch and restoring my library backup, but result is unchanged from above – download works and streaming does not.
Just to add, I use Tailscale to access other services on the same system, like a file share and web server. Enough seems to be working even for Roon ARC that I’m not sure how Tailscale can be directly the issue – TailScale is not application aware unless one gets into traffic filtering, which I have not – all defaults.
I saw a new version of Roon Server (2.0 build 1496) and ARC iOS app (1.0.6.2) were released. I upgraded and have the same new behaviour where downloads over 5G + Tailscale work but not streaming from my local library.
Could you please reproduce the issue and share the specific track name that fails? From there, we’ll be able to review a fresh Arc diagnostic report for additional clues. Thank you!
Hi — Alyssa Weilserstein, Transfigured Night, track 1 Haydn Cello Concerto #2 first movement. At the time I was connected by 5G with Tailscale, and Roon ARC searching etc. worked, as well as other uses for Tailscale to that system.
Development has a test to pass along for this instance. If you have a third network interface on the Linux machine (ie. WiFi, ethernet, and Tailscale), disable it, leaving only Tailscale and your main ethernet interface.
Create a new playlist of 10 randomly-selected tracks from your local library
With the Tailscale interface disconnected on both Linux and phone, connect to local WiFi on the phone and download this playlist to ARC.
Delete the local playlist from the phone. Connect to Tailscale on both server and phone and re-download the playlist.
The goal here is to lay bare diagnostically whether the network interface or the track data itself is triggering the failure.
From my message #7 above about 24 days ago, I’m now getting a different behaviour from original, where downloading works but streaming from my local library does not. I followed your test procedure and the download worked in both cases, but that is not testing streaming from the local library. I tried streaming several random songs via Tailscale and all fail. Streaming works immediately once I enable wifi on my phone.
When I look in RoonServer_log.txt I see the request for the song and the transcoding messages, so there is some basic communication working, and I do not see any error messages. Can I enable additional debugging that might show us what it is doing?
Diagnostics from ARC show downloads still fail at regular intervals, although the download possibly recovers before the UI shows any indication.
Opus/transcoding failures seem to accumulate after ARC has inadvertently become unauthorized at the session level - this is possibly a one-off instance if you’ve either a) restored a Backup recently or b) kept ARC closed for more than about a week.
We have an open investigation into connectivity and interruption management matching the symptoms you’ve broadly described more recently. I do recommend reinstalling ARC in the meantime for due diligence to restore the session layer authorization.
Hi @Connor – I deleted ARC from my phone, reinstalled, opened app, authenticated. Albums, cover art, playlists, searching are all working via Tailscale. Streaming from my library is not working – ARC reports “Poor connection”. I did this twice to be sure. I then downloaded the album that I tried to stream from via Tailscale + 5G, which succeeded, and then I was able to play the downloaded songs only. Streaming looks to be doing something different to all the other actions in ARC.
Hi @Evan this is interesting. I seem to be having the exact same issue and have raised a ticket also. My setup is an external USB connected directly to a mini pc running ROCK. Can you describe your setup? All of what you describe is the exact same thing I am experiencing.
Hi @Sean_O – My setup is has Roon Server on Linux with internal hard drive storage for my library, with access either via home wifi or Tailscale + 5G for remote access, with no firewall hole-punching for ARC (access via Tailscale) and ARC port forwarding port set to 0 (disabled). Everything works including streaming with ARC on home wifi, and everything works remotely via Tailscale + 5G except streaming from the local library (playing songs that are not already downloaded to ARC).
Development is preparing improvements to server - ARC connectivity in the next few releases that should affect this symptom. Please keep an eye out for upcoming details in Software Release Notes.
