I have a very simple requirement.. I flag my favourite tracks in Roon with a heart ( tracks , not albums).. have created a smart playlist of these in Roon… and have tried a million times to have these synch to Arc..
Sometimes the gods are with me and I get the playlist, in the correct sequence in Arc.. which I can use in offline mode in my car..
but 99% of the time… nothing I do seems to trigger a refresh of the Smart Playlist to synch and download to Arc on my mobile iPhone.
I have high regard for the Roon system in general but I think Arc is seriously degrading my Roon experience.
I have lived with this for years, hoping for a stable app update to make this simple process work.
All of my music is my own. I do not use any streaming services. I built my Roon library by ripping my cd collection to disk. I am always interested in discovering new (to me) music and will.purchase and download such music.
The Roon solution works for me… but Arc had been a total disaster.. I am familiar with and have a lot of experience building large commercial systems. I understand the challenges involved. So.. I have been patient up to now.
I have been recommending Roon to lots of people , especially those impressed with my setup.. but I always caution that Arc has not yet reached operational stability.
So, until I see Arc achieve a usability stage, I will no longer be recommending Roon and explaining why.
As music is important to me and I want to bring my favourite tracks always with me when I travel.. I will now be actively looking for an alternative to Arc. Two vip scenarios.. Driving and air travel.
I’ve got an A&K DAP, it’s wonderful. Combined with some Fit Ear custom IEMs, the sound is excellent and the latter block almost all external noise (can barely hear the aircraft)
I’ve got 1000s of ripped tracks on it and there’s still loads of space left on its internal memory - if that were to ever run out, it’ll take an SD card
I fail the see the point of Arc (or the other thing they recently introduced - so relevant i can’t even remember what it’s called ) and I wish development effort was concentrated on the core product - the thing I actually paid for
I love ARC because all the work I did for home Roon is reflected, such as correct credits, favorites etc. And I can play music I love that isn’t on streaming, without any hassles. And it updates the plays in Roon.
It’s great to have received this additional feature as a gift, though I didn’t even pay for it.
I never went the ARC route mainly due to exhorbitant cell costs here.
if you have all your own filles the why not an SD card in a cheap cell phone , or a DAP but they tend to be expensive.
I have 2 options , my OLD iPod 160 Classic (plugged USB into car audio system) and a 1 Tb SD Card in my normal phone (Samsung A55) then BT via USB Player Pro to either the car or BT Headphones. I dread to think how old the iPod is probably close on 15 - 20 yr
This is a longstanding issue with ARC. A workaround is to open the playlist edit function in Roon (not ARC) and close this function. It will then refresh the playlist and hopefully will download to your mobile device too.
Thanks . I will explore. Maybe that is why my Smart playlist does refresh from time to time. I did have a problem with the sort sequence .. but that seems ok now.
Just to answer a comment above re streaming.
I am not a fan of streaming… especially for my music.. I do not use Arc to stream… what I do want to do is to leverage my existing Roon library… be able to flag my favourite tracks (not albums) and have these tracks automatically synch and download to Arc on my mobile phone. I have 1TB storage on my phone.. and my favourites take only a tiny tiny percentage of this…
The advantage for me
a. I use Arc in my car .. my phone connects to my car high end audio system .. and magically .. my Roon favourites are available via actual saved tracks on my phone.
b. When travelling for waiting in airports or on the plane.. I connect my iPhone to a dac/amp . connect to my Sony headphones .. and again I have my favourite tracks with the best quality audio I can get in those circumstances…
c. With this approach … I have zero cell costs related to this as I am listing to music already downloaded to my phone.
Roon.
I am a really long term user of Roon and purchased the lifetime licence after I used it for a year or two. I think Roon is close to a perfect solution for me. My background is large scale commercial enterprise computing, have built and deployed large and complex systems. I understand what it takes to build a reliable and useful application. I must be lucky .. but I do not notice any issues with my use of Roon. I totally empathise with anyone who is running into issues. (Ps. I note the pending update to Net 10 … I suspect there will be a few trip wires.. but hopeful that these will be resolved promptly.).
When I reverse the sort and reverse the sort again… I found that my Smart List in IOS Arc had refreshed correctly.
I have the smart list sorted so the most recent additions to the smart list appear first.. (ie I want to list to my most recent favourites to appear at the top of the smart list.
I will monitor this going forward.
Hopefully, I can verify that my Arc SmartList is valid in advance of my next trip.
) and I wish development effort was concentrated on the core product - the thing I actually paid for
