Roon Crashing on MacM1, lost audio devices, and other thoughts

Some questions:

  1. Why does Roon crash all the time? (Mac Mini M1 2020, macOS Monterey version 12.3.1)
  2. When it’s not crashing, why does Roon keep forgetting all of my audio devices?
  3. Why does Roon charge such a large amount of money for its service and not reply to technical support requests?
  4. Why should I continue to pay the monthly subscription Roon demands for a product that doesn’t work?

Thoughts (in lieu of any response from Roon Technical Support) gratefully received.

Thank you

Richard
Edinburgh

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Wouldn’t it be great to know the answer to that one? My guess is that it has something to do with Macs and Roon not getting along, but that’s just a guess. I don’t run anything on Macs any more – macOS has gotten to be too fussy about a number of things.

Well, I’m not sure. Perhaps they just don’t care whether the tiny number of people (compartively) that have technical issues drop their service? Perhaps the people reporting technical issues don’t fill out their support request form properly, and those issues go to the bottom of the queue?

Why would you? I wouldn’t.

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There is no objective reason to pay for something that does not work at all. Apple obviously has new hardware and operating system, which are addressed here much more often than other platforms to help with problems. I read on the forum that using Mono (deprecated) could be a dealbreaker. Maybe these links will help to understand that better or even turn it off as a problem with .Net. That both come from the Microsoft world, I can already imagine that here no greater speed comes in, as with the competing systems. With Linux there was a developer outcry and then it was there just as fast in the offer.

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No bias in that statement.
.
And yet I have no issue running Roon on a variety of Macs. The issue is Monterey and has been discussed elsewhere. Mojave, Catalina and Big Sur pose no such issues. If you are able to deprecate to Big Sur the issues should disappear. I have an M1 mini and an M1 Macbook Air (as well as 8 other Macs on my network) and none crash or exhibit bad behaviour in Roon. Roon Core is run on a 2012 Mac Mini i7/16 GB RAM and is solid.

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Shame, really. I used to be all in with Macs, but they kept making it harder and harder to do the kinds of things I wanted to do. Not knocking it; it’s just that it keeps getting to be more and more work to do “a thing” with macOS. I’m sure there’s a market segment for which that’s a positive, somehow.

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What precisely are these things.

Various kinds of software development and testing. No longer remember the precise details. It’s been a few years. A few Mac-less years. Things just kept getting harder and harder to do, IMO.

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Swift or Cocoa or C++ what were you writing? What development tools were you using? What sort of software?

This is all extremely off-topic. But I think the real problem was building things like Roon, multi-platform single-source software. No Swift, no Cocoa, no Objective-C. I’m sure that if you’re building Mac apps to run only under macOS, things are much cleaner. But if you’re working with Rust and Julia, as I was, things fit together much less cleanly.

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Marked as “Solution”. Subscription cancelled. Thanks.

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Didn’t you jump the gun a bit here? Normally, when you post a support request, it’s expected that some time will pass before the support team get back to you.

This is a good question, though it’s worth noting that it’s the client component of Roon that’s crashing not the core. I run both on my Mac (Mac Mini M1 2020, macOS Monterey version 12.3.1) and the core is flawless, but the client nearly always crashes a couple of times when I try to launch it.

Because it will get fixed at some point. Numerous people have flagged this issue so I imagine a fix will be rolled out soon.

I know you’ve marked this as solved, but I’m flagging @support anyway - just in case they can get it fixed before your subscription runs out :slight_smile:

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Out of interest we are told that the majority of the sub cost goes to 3rd party metadata and other suppliers , Cloud costs etc

If the cap don’t fit don’t wear it.

I would be interested to find out what you move to instead

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Running a Roon core on my 2017 MacBook Air which also doubles as music player in the living room. And my daily driver is a 2020 M1 MacBook Pro. Both run the latest version of Roon on macOS Monterey 12.3.1.

Both have 256 gb of storage, 8 gb of RAM and run rock solid. No crashes at all.

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The Tidal interface does everything I need it to.

Some time has passed.

Yep, time will do that :slight_smile:

More seriously, Roon support aren’t as prompt as many people would like, and will probably be slower still as you marked your problem as solved.

This client crashing issue on iOS devices has been a dogged problem for years. I have another thread discussing the same. Why should such basic stability still plague the app for such a long time? No one would tolerate this elsewhere with other offerings. What if Spotify crashed every 5 seconds?

Roon is amazing when it works. If there were anything that truly competes with it - I would leave - despite lifetime membership. Nothing really does though…plenty of solutions meet or surpass Roon sound quality but nothing comes close to being as complete or matching its frankly gorgeous interface.

All too often at this point I am left to use native apps like Lumin and Volumio. Volumio keeps getting better and better but remains a tad fiddly. It’s community rivals roon’s and it’s creator and main developer listen to their customers.

Lumin interface is a mixed bag, has a lot of functionality if a bit unsightly - but if you’re not running a lumin streamer - then it’s not really relevant.

Roon is the way forward. I believe in this product but it needs better engagement from Roon engineering and to be shepherded by owners less hostile to their customers.

My two cents.

Personally I think they need to move to native apps for the remotes. Android has its own fair share of issues to. No other app looses connection or gets shut down like Roon does. I can have only 3 apps active and whilst it’s in the background my Pixel will just kill it’s network access or kill the app. It’s obviously consuming more resources than it likes. Try any other app and this just doesn’t happen in the same way. This is infuriating for lock screen controls as they stop working. You press pause or skip and nothing happens at all as it’s been closed down yet remains active in the lockscreen you can tell when it’s happend as the songs stop updating on it . Every other music app works as it should with locksceen controls.

Thanks Dave. As I’ve terminated my subscription, they are free to take as long as they like now to respond. All the best.

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Hey @Richard_Lyon,

We’re sorry to hear that you’re having problems with using Roon on Mac/Big Sur. We’d be happy to help get you going if you’re interested. You haven’t provided any system or setup details so we’d need to gather those. We’d hate to see you cancel if we can remedy this.

(BTW: Your monthly subscription is still set to renew, you can adjust that here)

Prompted by this comment I searched your support history. It looks like you experienced some Mac-specific issues with secondary monitors last year that were solved by making some changes on your end. Additionally, you reported that you’re getting crashes on startup a couple of days ago but didn’t provide any setup or system details. So, I’ve pulled logs to take a closer look and will get back to you with the details.

Screen Shot 2022-04-08 at 10.10.24 AM

We apologize that there’s been a delay in hearing back from us. We’re adding extra support agents to meet the demand posed by the influx of customers we’re adding every month.

As for Roon on Mac troubles specifically, we’ve had a difficult time determining why some customers have issues while others who are running Roon on the same exact MAC OS and Machine model have none at all. (I personally ran Roon on a 2020 M1 with your same OS absolutely problem-free before going to Nucleus.) These factors generally suggest some type of local interaction with settings on the machine and those typically take some troubleshooting back and forth to chase down.

If you’d like help please let us know. If you’re committed to canceling you’ll want to adjust your account settings with the link I provided above.

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