Roon & ARC have become incredibly unreliable for me - what is going on?

It appears that their is a systemic issue with this current configuration as i have and continue to have all the same issues you have described along with some additional problems that i thought was based on my new custom music server still being developed. I have an additional problem when using the new Muse program I initially could stream in DSD 512 without issue and excellent sound quality but then clicks and pops and bad distortion along with loud squarks on changing tracks threatened to destroy my speakers. Changing back to DSD 256 initially fixed the issue until this also exhibited the same faults and now running DSD 128 for the past couple of days seems to have remedied the problem. Never had this problem in the past and the PCM settings are un usable horrific distortion also neve experienced before along with now not being able to direct connect to the DAC as it is just no longer recognized but never an issue prior very strange.

What is the average latency between your endpoints and the core? The accessibility of the admin page does not necessarily mean your network has not a problem.

I can only guess. In my LAN it is 2-4 ms and on the road it cannot be more than 30 ms.

I experience more or less the same. ARC is very unreliable for me, when i play ARC in my garden it stops 10 times per afternoon easily. I did not try to load ROON app itself to see if this still has connection but when i use this for listening i have never had any issues with the connection.
What i noticed is when ARC ā€˜hangsā€™ it will not play the next track in the tracklist, when i push ā€˜nextā€™ twice (and thereby hopping past this ā€˜bad trackā€™) it usually picks up the thread and plays again. When the ā€˜bad connectionā€™ is on - i need to switch between WiFi and 5G mobile data.
I tested Spotify in exactly the same circumstances and no glitch whatsoever. I will try to load the ROON app and will try the lowest quality and see if that improves my situation.

Delete the Arc app from your phone and reinstall it and it should correct the issue

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Your problem sounds quite similar to what I experienced several months ago. In my case the fan in the NUC had failed and the NUC was overheating, causing all those weird problems. Does your NUC feel hot to the touch? If it does, it shouldnā€™t. Blow out the dust, if any, as a first step. If that doesnā€™t work, replace the fan. Itā€™s cheap and fairly simple to do.

Just to say I was having similar issues where using Arc was breaking not only itself but also browsing on remotes fairly regularly. This solved it, so thank you.

I know itā€™s a pain to lose all the downloads but this definitely seems worth a go versus having to restart the core on my Ubuntu box via Tailscale from the train.

I have also deleted the app and reinstalled it to test if that makes any short-term difference. Iā€™d still like to know what is going on causing this issue as I do not think deleting ARC should be the proper solution to problems like these.

@Stephen_Vorenberg thanks for this tipp also. The fan is working properly and the CPU temps in the BIOS seem to be fine but I still set the fan to a higher preset to see if that changes anything also.

@Will_Moore I agree with you but reinstalling the app should be the last resort. Are you planning to use this as your go to, whenever your issue occurs or has re reinstall alleviated the issues for now?

Iā€™m with you, hopefully they figure it out and an update fixes it. But yes, reinstalling the app has fixed my issues for the last 24 hours or so. Previously I couldnā€™t get past an hour without a restart.

Sadly my experience with Arc so far is it is great for a few months and then something happens requiring a reinstall so Iā€™ve learned to not be too attached to my download.s

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Yes. That might be my tactic going forward until it is reliable.

I3 8gb ram, have you looked at CPU and RAM usage? When I peg the CPU or use too much RAM I get similar issues. YMMV.

That is well in line for small to medium-sized libraries. 4GB RAM is actually the recommendation and an i3 is plenty powerful. ARC anyway does all MUSE DSP on device so the ROCK is only streaming the music and my hardware should be powerful enough for that.

Do you know if there is actually a way to check RAM and CPU usage with ROCK? I donā€™t know if there is.

For CPU I can make a good guess with the processing speed displayed in Roon. Mostly it does not show, meaning it is above 100x. If it shows it does not go below 90x.

Update 28 July

After resetting ARC, increasing the fan speed, and again reinstalling Roon OS on the ROCK the issue reappeared today. Listening with ARC seems to clog up my core over time, making my whole library inaccessible either through ARC or Roon. The only thing I can find in the logs before this happened is this:

ā€œTrace: [mobile] Got Hello Request body={ā€œcoreIdā€: (ā€¦)ā€
ā€œInfo: [mobile] GOT HTTP API /helloā€
ā€œTrace: [mobile] API_PlaybackInfo(59030986 / 202:0:129299660)ā€

These lines appear every two seconds

Hey,
So, confession, I read Roon core in the title and read right past ROCK in the next line. Iā€™m running Roon core on a dedicated windows PC. It has an annoying habit of slowly eating RAM and CPU cycles and behaves similarly to what you describe until I restart the Roon Core applicationā€¦
Now, I bought a drive and will be installing Rock this weekend. I am curious to see what transpires. Should be interesting, it will be on an N95 CPU but Iā€™m hoping the lightweight Linux base will be okay. Iā€™ll let you know! Also Iā€™ll see if I can answer your system resource use like CPU % and RAM question.

Okay, that was quick. Insanely simple install. I am up and running on an Intel N95cpu, 8gb RAM, 35K song library, Tidal and Qobuz, 5 endpoints and ARC. Iā€™ll run it for a while and let you know. I found out the OS is locked and there would be no way to obtain the stats I mentioned, I apologize for the false lead. . .
Thanks for turning me onto ROCK!!
Peace.

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Following this thread as I have been experiencing similar issues with Roon lately.

After using ARC for less than half an hour at a time, playback ends and I receive a ā€˜Poor Connectionā€™ notification. After checking the Roon Core I get the ā€˜loading Roon iconā€™ (without any content ever loading) while trying to navigate anywhere in my library. Despite the inaccessable library, I am still able to click on and view settings via the Core as well as test and refresh my Roon ARC settings (which still gives me the tick, informing me that ARC can securely access the Core.)

Only after restarting the core app am I able to resume using Roon (and ARC).

I will try deleting and reinstalling the ARC app on my phone (as suggested above) to see if that resolves the issue.

Hopefully, Roon can identify the cause of this issue and resolve it in a future patch.

Just yesterday had to restart the server to get Arc to start working again, after using it for a couple of hours. Next time this happens Iā€™ll see if I can see anything on my core (Win10)

Hi @DonRom. This reads as exactly my error pattern as well. A reinstall of ARC did not help. The error re-occurred yesterday and today already and I did a clean reset and reinstall of the app on Thursday.

But honestly I donā€™t know if Roon Support is still active hereā€¦.

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So I think my reset of Arc might have just been luck too. After 3 days it has reappeared. Iā€™m not running ROCK, but Roon Server on Ubuntu LTS so the problem at least goes that wide. System use all looks like Iā€™d expect on Glances and nothing Ubuntu side is out of date.

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