It looks like after the latest update Roon lost all my Chromecasts. I enjoyed streaming to a Chromecast connected to my speakers. But now I am asked to manage audio devices.
I have a Chromecast Audio, Chromecast Video connected through an HDMI splitter to speakers only, and I have several wired Nvidia Shield boxes that have Chromecast built-in. I was able to see them all in the Audio section of Settings. Since the Shields are wired it’s not a WiFi issue.
I see my wired PC in the Audio section and my phone on WiFi. But not a single Chromecast. I turned on them all. I rebooted the PC with the core. I am lost. And I don’t see this reported recently. Is there any way to troubleshoot?
EDIT: I also have a Roon Bridge on a Raspberry Pi which I rarely use now. It’s on WiFi and I see it in Audio and can stream to it. I tried to find if anything could be wrong with my network but other devices, wired and wireless are fine. It seems to be Chromecast related. Both wireless and wired Chromecasts are not visible anymore.
Yes. That was the first thing I tried when I lost my main Chromecast. Then I plugged in another Chromecast and it showed up in Home, too. They are all there and well.
ChromeCast detection is based on multicast and mDNS. On the Roon Core machine, with the package avahi-utils installed, you can use the command avahi-browse _googlecast._tcp in the console. It shows you all the detected ChromeCast devices – Roon should see the same devices then. If none are shown, you have a networking issue that you need to resolve.
Thanks for the tip. I don’t see anything with that command. When I do avahi-browse -a that should show all services I see my Apple TVs as _mediaremotetv._tcp and _companion-link._tcp, my Plex server as Device Info and Microsoft Windows Network, and my ecobee3 as _hap._tcp. But no Chromecasts.
I am not very familiar with Avahi. Can you give me a hint where to look? I have run the Avahi daemon on LAN in pfSense since the very beginning. I haven’t made changes lately but there was a Roon update a few days ago. My first thought was to correlate it with this but maybe it’s something else. I see Chromecasts in Home on my phone. I don’t know where else to look.
Just having avahi activated on the pfSense, without any special configuration, doesn’t do any harm AFAIK. Roon supports only flat network topologies (core, remotes, displays and endpoints all in the same network [collision domain]) and in this scenario, the router (firewall) shouldn’t matter anyway.
Maybe a switch or WLAN issue – not that you mentioned using those (missing details).
What ever the reason may be, if the Roon Core machine can’t see the zeroconf service announcements, then obviously Roon can’t know about them – so not a Roon issue.
I must apologize as it was not a Roon issue. I found the problem. I added a new semi-managed switch to my LAN and put the PC with the Roon core on it. I enabled IGMP snooping and activated multicast flood blocking. The older switch had IGMP snooping enabled already and my Chromecasts connect through the older switch. Once I disabled multicast flood blocking in the new switch I started seeing the Chromecasts again and .local addresses started to resolve. Thank you, @BlackJack for pointing me to zeroconf where I learned its relation to multicast. And now I realized that I need Avahi deamon on the router only if I use more than one subnet.