I’m very impressed with the look, feel and functionality offered by the Roon ARC client. I have an Android phone with no SIM that I use as a cheap, dedicated DAP with an external DAC/headphone amp.
Although I’ve installed ARC on this, it’s slightly superflous as the phone has a large SD card with most of my library from home on it. It would be a great feature to be able to have the ARC app able to scan and use the local copies of my library.
Yeah, that would be a good feature. I also use USB Audio Player Pro occasionally, where in the settings I can select the path to each folder. I have a local library uploaded from the NAS, but also albums that I bought on Qobuz and downloaded with its app. USB Audio Player Pro has all these files in its library. Why shouldn’t ARC do the same?
Additionally, a good option in ARC would be to set a microSD card for downloads via the app itself. I recently bought a 512GB card for my smartphone and it makes me sad to think that ARC doesn’t use it. The free space in the internal memory is already limited, only 25GB. HiRes 24/96 albums would quickly fill that space.
Good call about being able to specify the SD card as the repository for the ARC downloads.
I’d still like to be able to specify my SD card based library as a source for the ARC app to be able to play from. It’s a nice, well thought out interface and would make a good local player if it could see the FLAC and other files I’ve already got stored there.
I also forgot to mention that the path of the downloaded albums should be available to the user to be able to add them to other players, as I did with downloaded from Qobuz purchased albums in USB Audio Player Pro. From what I’ve read somewhere on the forum, that’s not the case. One of the users searched for files using various explorers and did not find their location.
I completely agree with this feature request, @Steven_Wilkes. I have about 500 gb of local music stored on my iPhone, and it would frankly be simplest for Roon Arc to be able to access and play it.
My experience using Arc has been great, when it works, however, due to reception issues, that tends to be hit or miss, at best. More often than not, for this reason, I simply use an app capable of playing local files, instead of Arc.
Exactly the same situation here. I have an exact copy of my Roon local storage on my phone SDcard so would love to be able to use Roon to play that rather than relying on reception.
To be clear, I would pay extra for the Roon ARC app, if it would allow me to play music files stored locally, on my device.
At this point, I rarely use ARC, because the connectivity and reception issues are too consistent and time-consuming to make it worthwhile.
I’ve stopped using ARC, not because the sound or performance are poor when it works. They are excellent. I’ve stopped using it, because it works intermittently.
I have stopped using it, in favor of Onkyo HF Player, which simply plays locally stored music.
If Roon were to charge for a version of ARC that played local files and could still connect to a core, it would obviously be another revenue stream for them. Seems like that would appeal to any business.
I can’t think that it would harm Roon Labs to let the Arc app play local files - who knows, it could pique someone’s interest in taking out a subscription…
From a revenue point of view, a Roon subscriber could use the Arc app to play local files.
A paid for renamed version of the app could be provided through the App/Play stores for those without a Roon subscription and just used for local media playback.