I have a number of reliability issues when trying to use Roon ARC in the car. I feel it used to be more reliable. I will describe all of them, and also how I have worked around them. I know it is hard to investigate and fix multiple issues at once, but I think of this more as a useful (?) feedback to the developers so they can perhaps add diagnostics/logging to areas that are failing:
1. Wifi->mobile network handover: Most of the time when I start ARC playback in my car, it's in the front yard and the phone is still on wifi. If I start playback at this point, once the wifi falls our of reach, the playback will most often just hang. As a workaround, I now turn off wifi from my phone before starting ARC playback. I wish I didn't have to do this.
2. ARC gets trampled by other media players: If I have listed to TIDAL recently, it'll run all over ARC in Android Auto. TIDAL will play, and even if I try to initiate ARC playback from the car display, TIDAL stays active. Sometimes they play on top of each other. Today I started ARC playback but the car radio remained active and no ARC playback was heard. As a workaround, I force stop TIDAL from my phone and mute the radio ("AV off") from my car before starting ARC playback. This way ARC can actually be heard.
3. ARC activity is heard but not seen: Due to better usability on the mobile, I usually find an album/playlist on mobile and start the playback on mobile before connecting to Android Auto. Most often even if can then hear this music in my car, the ARC app on Android Auto shows no activity. I am not sure if the music is somehow playing through Bluetooth or if ARC is just failing in mirroring the app activity on the Android Auto side, but it appears as if nothing is playing on ARC.
4. Progress bar / time tracker: ARC almost never tracks the song correctly in the car. Most often the progress bar gets stuck at 00:00 in the fullscreen player, and shows loading indicator in the tile view. Often the progress bar starts, but then it doesn't realize that the song has changed and keeps counting time well over the total time of the original track. There is no workaround here - I just live with it.
5. Missing link to ARC: Finally, and this is pretty minor, the small song indicator / shortcut back to ARC that is supposed to be floating on top of other Android Auto apps seems to be missing. I don't know if ARC is the only player that doesn't have it, or if loading and showing it fails. I am talking about the small circle in the bottom right corner with three level meters dancing around.
Describe your network setup
Not sure if this is relevant, but I have fiber-optic connection from my ISP, Google Wifi router as a firewall, CAT6 cabling in the house and Roon ROCK on Intel NUC hardwired into the local network.
Thank you for the report. We have a few clarifying questions to triage this report for our QA team.
Do you have ARC open on the phone - and in the background - before getting into the car to connect to Android Auto?
What is the make/model of Android Auto head unit do you have? If you’re not certain of the manufacturer, but the unit came standard, please share the a) year and b) make of the car.
This issue is as old as the hills, and still no progress has been made:
I’ve had a theory for a while that this happens when you are a dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 network at home, and your cellular connection is also dual-stack. Is that at play in your case?
My network does not have IPv6 enabled. Then again, incidentally I had to restart my network today so there’s a slim chance it was enabled before. I’ll ensure IPv6 is off and will observe any improvements.
I have automatic updates on my phone. I checked and Android Auto was last updated a few weeks back.
The same fix will possibly improve this behavior, especially if you sometimes use Android Auto itself to launch ARC rather then phone.
Connectivity handoff is an area which regularly sees patching and fixing by ARC devs. Please let us know in a new thread if these symptoms are persistent after the next few releases.
