Roon crashes on launch

Yes, via Settings==>Backups==>Schedule Backups.

If worse came to worse, you could install a completely fresh copy of Roon and restore from Settings==>Backups==>Find Backups

I’m not Roon support , so don’t do anything so drastic until @dylan gets back to you.

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Hi @Dylan. It’s now 5 days that I’ve been without music. I would really expect your technical support team to be addressing my issue more quickly than is turning out to be the case.

Hello @nickharambee, my apologies for the delay. We look a look at your log file and recommend the following:

  1. Stop Roon on the remote
  2. Check PM’s for this step
  3. Remove Roon folder on the remote
  4. Remove Roon from applications
  5. Install a fresh version of Roon app

Hello @nuwriy

Thank you for your message. I am not clear from your instructions. When you say ‘remote’ are you referring to the Mac from which I am trying to play Roon, as opposed to the Mac mini which is running the Roon core?

  1. Stop Roon on the remote

By this do you mean Quit the Roon application on the remote Mac?

  1. Check PM’s for this step

Am I deleting this file on the remote Mac or the Mac mini running the Roon core?

  1. Remove Roon folder on the remote

Which folder are you referring to here? What is the location?

  1. Remove Roon from applications

On the Remote Mac or the Mac mini running the Roon core?

  1. Install a fresh version of Roon app

Answer 4 should help me clarify this.

Please try to make your answers as clear as possible.

Nick

Hello @nickharambee,

If other remotes are working just fine, go ahead and do these steps on the remote. Thanks!

Hello @nuwriy

Please read my questions and answer them properly. You haven’t answered all questions with your one line response.

There was no file .rnsem5xx-roon in the tmp folder on the remote Mac. Only on the Mac mini which is running the core. I have deleted this. Still Roon doesn’t work on the Mac mini.

7 days now without music. I am not impressed!

Nick

I am totally confused as to what to do. You have said that I should remove my Roon folder. Which folder is this? You have also said nothing about how I restore my library once I have reinstalled Roon. Please be very specific in your responses.

Nick

Another update. It turns out that I have backups from the past couple of months (pretty much every 4 days) as I had set Roon to create these automatically. Unfortunately none of these backups restore (with a fresh installation of Roon). The restore fails at about 5% with all backups.

If it’s not possible to fix my current Roon library or restore one of the backups, I am done with Roon.

Also, if it’s not possible to get more timely support for a paid product, I am also going to move on.

With Best Wishes,

Nick

If you can’t successfully restore a Roon library backup, then you might be running into this -

After encountering that just once and consequently having to rebuild my library from scratch, I now follow this backup schedule -

Not much help now, but there it is…

OTOH, as a last ditch effort, I would make sure that all of Roon’s directories on the Core machine are deleted and then try one more time with a fresh install and library restore.

Once you have deleted all of Roon’s folders, but not the backups, and have a clean install, then you can find and restore your backups from Settings==>Backups==>Find Backups.

Thanks Slim. As I have said to tech support above, I will not be continuing to use Roon if it’s the case that I can’t recover all of the work that I have done on my library in recent months. I will also be asking for a refund - I am very unimpressed with the speed of tech support, and the possibility of having backups that can’t be restored, meaning that I would have to start from scratch. Huge amounts of work has gone into creating Roon tags, playlists, etc.

Nick

I understand and sympathize completely.

Before you throw in the towel, try this -

At this point, all you have to lose is some of your time.

Good luck.

Are there directories other than /Library/Roon (on a Mac) that need to be deleted?

https://kb.roonlabs.com/Database_Location

When you delete Roon’s associated folders, keep the logs somewhere, in case support wants to do a post mortem.

Hi @nickharambee,

I have been discussing your case with @nuwriy and he flagged your thread for review.

I’m looking over the issue and a few details are not clear:

So to clarify here - the issue only impacts your Mac that is running as a Remote (as in it’s being connected to another Mac which hosts the Roon Core) and the Core Mac is still working as expected?

I would start by installing Roon fresh on the Mac that is acting as a remote:

  • Make a new Backup of your current Roon Database (from the Core)
  • Exit out of Roon on the Core + Remote
  • Navigate to your Roon’s Database Location on the Remote Mac (not the Core)
  • Find the folder that says “Roon”
  • Rename the “Roon” folder to “Roon_old”
  • Reinstall the Roon App from our Downloads Page to generate a new Roon folder
  • Re-launch Roon on the Remote Mac and try connecting to the Core again

You have our apologies for the frustrations here, do let us know if reinstalling the remote resolves this issue or if we need to look into this further we can certainly do so, thanks!

No, the first sentence of the first post I made is as follows:

Hi @nickharambee,

Thanks for clarifying that the issue is on the Core, apologies it was not clear.
Let’s proceed as follows:

  1. Create a new database on your Core:
  • Exit out of Roon
  • Navigate to your Roon’s Database Location (on the Core this time)
  • Find the folder that says “Roon”
  • Rename the “Roon” folder to “Roon_old”
  • Reinstall the Roon App from our Downloads Page to generate a new Roon folder
  1. Try restoring your backup from a few months ago

  2. If the backup fails again, please send a new set of Core logs by using these instructions via Dropbox and post a link here. Note: Please only send the logs after you have tried to restore.

Hopefully the new logs will provide more details on what is going wrong with the restore.

2 posts were split to a new topic: Windows 10 - Roon can’t start

@noris Well, I am pleased to say that I have now, at last, managed to restore a backup from July, meaning that not much of my work/library has been lost. The procedure you shared in your last post in August is a procedure that I had attempted several times before (following the advice of @xxx here). So I can only conclude the following:

  • My Roon library became corrupted, but the automated backups were not corrupted.
  • For some reason the latest version of Roon in early August wasn’t able to restore my backups - so there was also an issue with the Roon software.
  • A more recent Roon update, presumably Roon 1.7 (Build 610), enabled the restoring of backups to work again.

I am very relieved to have everything back, but still concerned based on some of what I have read on this forum about the lack of validation of Roon’s backups, stated most clearly in this topic. To know that a Roon library can become corrupted and that all backups could be corrupted too, without checks made at the time of making a backup is concerning. So, before I decide on whether or not to continue to use Roon, I would like to hear from Roon staff about the implementation of this much needed feature.

I am also rather unhappy about the length of time that I was without music, due to the initial slow response of the technical support team, and would like some assurance about the anticipated time frame for responding to such significant issues.

With Best Wishes,

Nick

Hi @nickharambee,

I wanted to check in and confirm that everything is still running okay with you. I’m sorry that you had a bad experience here, and I’m hoping this is something we can improve in the future.

I definitely recommending adding your voice to the feature request for this feature. Currently validation isn’t something that the backup system can do — The backup is made as-is, just a snapshot of your database at that time.

There are a number of reasons that a Roon database can become corrupted, and this can include failing hard drives, as well as other environmental factors, like power loss, or sync programs tampering with the contents of the database. It’s extremely hard to know what might be at play here, but what this means is that when Roon reads the database back, the files are different from what was originally written to the drive, and the changes are significant enough that Roon cannot load the database properly.

Sometimes, database corruption can be “latent”, meaning that part of the database is corrupted, but the database can still load. Often this latent corruption is revealed when Roon updates to a new database format, as this process requires that every record in the database is accessed.

Generally we try to respond to any issues within one business day, excluding weekends. We’ve been making some changes to our system recently to help improve the time that it takes for a response, but it is also important to note that some complex issues require in-depth investigation and collaboration with other members of our team, as was the case here. We strive to resolve issues as fast as possible regardless, but I agree that this issue took longer than anyone would have liked to resolve, and we are making adjustments to our processes based on incidents like this.

You have our apologies again for the inconvenience here. If there’s anything else we can do for you here, or if you have any questions about the above, please let me know and we’ll do everything we can to get this resolved for you.

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