I am using Roon ARC on an iPhone with iOS 16.1. For my holidays I have downloaded a lot of albums. Unfortunately there are severe bugs in arc.
Some albums just play fine. Checkmark.
In some albums, every (!) song is only played about 30 seconds to 1 minute, then it is replayed from the beginning and the second time the song is played in full length. This happens for every song on the album.
Some songs play only for say 60 to 90 seconds and then the message „Corrupt media“ is displayed. For these songs it occurs always.
For a 1.0 release Roon ARC is quite a big cast, with many features. Unfortunately all of this is worthless if the primary purpose of playing music is not achieved.
I am back to Plexamp and had to download my albums in 128kbps quality on a lousy internet connection.
As above, not all. But, it seems our tracks are getting corrupted. There’s a few topics now. I think we need to get them merged all into one and report it as a full bug.
I’ve been a fan of ARC because it would be a seamless extension of my large local library into my car. In the real world I get a lot of “Unexpected Playback Error” when playing from my playlists. All of the songs are locally downloaded to my device, an older iPhone 8 with 64GB that I use just for media in the car.
I have 4 playlists downloaded, not a lot of songs, appx 9 GB over the four lists, all lossless. I hist shuffle and the Russian roulette begins. Sometimes I’ll get through 15 songs, other times I’ll get through two songs but it’s a given the error will happen at some point during playback. The song stops and restarts on its own but going back about five seconds from where it stopped. It will do this a few times even if I stop the track manually it will restart on its own repeating from where it stopped.
The only way to cure it is to go to another playlist and start playing or shuffle songs from that different playlist. Since the only thing I used the phone for is Roon ARC in the car, I’ve disabled notifications in ARC and Siri search in the ARC settings. Only Local Network, Background App Refresh and Cellular Data are enabled.
The phone is stripped from anything non essential or that cannot be removed from iOS and there’s over 40 GB of free space.
In theory, ARC is very much a value add for my Roon subscription. In practice, it’s been a very poor implementation. I’ll be patient though but coming here to see if there were similar complaints and hopefully a workaround, I haven’t spotted anything similar to my issue.
Since several people are affected a bug in Roon ARC seems quite obvious. Should also be easy to reproduce: Just download a bunch of albums at once, go into offline mode and use it for some hours. The problem should surface.
Would be great if @support could have a look and eventually merge or link related topics.
There were multiple tickets merged in this month’s release of ARC 1.0.4 that will hopefully prevent any corruption from seeping into downloaded local content.
However, checking through automated diagnostics from your account since your report, tech support has been unable to ascertain whether or not you’re experiencing stable playback. We’re standing by to assist in the event that you’re having problems with ARC.
I’d be more than happy to contribute or gather logs or what have you. I’ve been treating this as a device side issue by turning off ALL iOS notifications, I’ve tried it with ARC offline mode and ARC with cellular connectivity, the results have been the same.
Basically trouble free for a handful of songs, then an interruption in playback when I have to physically hit play again and it will stop playback in a few seconds, the same details as my post above.
Whether I connect my phone to the car via bluetooth or directly connected via a USB cable, the behavior I described is the same.