I’m looking for some feedback on other users’ experience with Roon Arc and its impact on phone battery life. I set it up and had it working surprisingly quickly. I listened to about two albums worth of music, give or take. I felt like it worked pretty well. Sound quality was good and no drop-outs. The only negative was that it really drained my phone’s battery. About 30% in about two hours. Is this typical for other users? My phone is very new (iPhone 16 Pro) so I don’t think that’s the issue. Wondering what other users are seeing when they use Arc.
4 Likes
I also find ARC is heavy on iPhone battery.
It can also stress my phone enough that it stops charging when connected to power!
But your case sounds even worse than mine.
Yes
Drains the battery extremely fast. I think it is a tiny bit better than before - but still needs a lot of work. Phone also gets quite warm when playing as well.
5 Likes
At least I know it’s not just me.
Yes – ARC uses a lot of battery and my phone gets toasty warm.
Same here with an iPhone 16 Pro Max
I’ve done tests with various combinations of:
- Downloaded vs Streaming albums
- Headphones DSP on/off
- EQ on/off
- Volume leveling on/off
- Wifi vs Cellular
- Headroom on/off
Using a FOSI DS02 USB dongle
Battery use is pretty consistent at 14-16% per hour when doing nothing else with the phone and it certainly warms up
By comparison - playing Apple Music (without DSP obviously because it has none) uses about 4% per hour.
I’m usually not far from a charger so can just top up after listening to ARC… but some lower battery (especially with downloaded music and no DSP) would be much appreciated.
I have an iPhone 14. Streaming music tends to drain the batterij. But ARC is the worst in this regard. And I have a free pocket warmer when ARC is running.
I also have a iphone 14. But without the problems listet here. Not getting warm and not draining the batterie fast while using ARC.
I used it on a longer flight a few days ago and it stayed in normal temp.
I’m on a Samsung Android phone; it does drain a fair bit of battery but I’m not convinced it’s any worse than when I was just listening to Tidal or my FLAC collection directly. I’ve got a couple of different DACs I use (a FIIO KA5 and a Hidiz S3) and I figured the additional battery drain was driving those things in my case!
One of the Roon developers contacted me and asked me a few questions. When I was listening I was using a Go Bar dongle DAC which would be powered through the phone connection. It seems that would definitely be a contributing factor in the accelerated battery drain.
3 Likes
This is now the primary issue I am facing with ARC (though not the only one); iPhone 15 Pro drains super-fast and gets super-hot when using ARC. Doesn’t matter if I’m on wifi or cellular, doesn’t matter if I’m using wireless CarPlay or wired CarPlay, doesn’t matter whether it’s wired or wireless headphones, doesn’t matter if I use downloads or am streaming my local library or Qobuz, and I don’t use external DACs with my phone (except the Apple headphone adapter). ARC is just a huge resource hog and it’s a bit of a deal-killer for me, but I am hopeful they will smash this bug like they’ve smashed most of the others with ARC.
4 Likes
My iPhone 12 Pro gets super warm, and additionally:
- The app randomly crashes
- The app gets stuck when a song is paused by another stream (YouTube, Instagram video) and either doesn’t restart by itself or becomes completely frozen
1 Like
On Pixel 8 Pro it is not dramatically different than using Qobuz app. We are afterall talking about a program that constant stream data from wireless. I played a couple of hours of music and it drained the battery by around 10%, this is on 5G and not wifi. I think it is reasonable.
1 Like
Same here re battery life. Doesn’t matter if I’m streaming from tidal or my local Flac files and DAC / no DAC. ARC just crushes my iPhone 15 Pro battery.
2 Likes
For those of you experiencing abnormally high ARC battery drain, is it happening when ARC is in the foreground or background?
- Foreground
- Background
0
voters
I think it is both, but not sure. I normally use Arc when commuting on a train, so I am in and out of arc, but It is playing the entire time
This is a relatively new issue for me. Over the past three(?) months, my phone will get so hot it tells me that it will no longer charge until the temperature goes back down. I have it on a pad charger at work and have the app on the foreground. For over a year this was not a problem ever. Now it is a near-constant issue.
On an iPhone you can look at what is using your battery under Settings->Battery. ARC is a big user relative to other things but by no means out of line with my use of it.
If you look at activity it is mostly in background but I imagine that is because it’s mostly running when I’m not directly interacting with the app or the phone.
I have an iPhone 13 256g. I found that when I have a lot of tracks (any resolution) saved to my phone the battery drain was astonishing. I use arc at work for about 9 to 10 hours a day playing through Bluetooth and with a smaller amount of tracks (about 3000) saved to phone my battery will drop by about 40% but with about 7000 tracks and above saved to phone the battery will drop by about 80%. Phone also gets very hot when downloading tracks to phone.
That’s indeed an interesting note. Maybe ARC does some offline metadata/track indexing in the background until every track is indexed? Then, resuming indexing if set of tracks changes? Does anyone know how ARC handles search/links and the like while being offline?