ROCK Server On Intel NUC, 32GB RAM, Intel I-7
Data is stored on a network share of approx 20 TB
Network is mixture of hardwired and Wifi
Approx 91,000 Tracks in Database
I noticed that my Macbook Pro was having issues with Roon recently. I went and updated all my devices as I have several different devices that access Roon. Iphones, Ipads (two), a Macbook Pro and a Mac Studio and two Windows 11 devices. As of right now, everything is updated running the latest operating systems and display drivers (where possible as updating display drivers in Mac isn’t like Windows).
Nothing seemed to help and I’m only seeing this behavior on my Mac’s. The Roon window’s content will flash and refresh erratically, sometimes displaying what’s there sometimes not. Roon on the Macbook will drop the connection to the server and say it can’t find it. It says, “lost connection, Trying to reconnect…” “Select a different core” as well. It will do this intermittently and then connect and disconnect, showing me a message that says “waiting on your core”.
I couldn’t figure out what’s going on until I noticed that this only occurs when I have Roon open on my Mac Studio AND my Macbook Pro at the same time. If I close one of them, the other works just fine. And I have to completely close out the application. In Mac, when you click the red close icon, it doesn’t completely unload the application from memory and you have to right-click it’s icon and select “quit”. When I select quit, the other Mac device will start working just fine.
I have taken a video of this behavior however it’s about 250MB and too big to upload here. I can share it some other way if you have a way to do it. I would appreciate it you would look into this.
“migrate” in the context would mean if you used Apple Migration Assistant or any other way of restoring from a timemachine backup of another mac to MS or MBP
if it is the case above, trashing the app from the app folder will not work. you have to also delete all the (roon) files/folders in the library folder
take a 5 minutes look at this, maybe is the same thing or maybe not
So you’re saying that a complete uninstall from MacOS doesn’t completely uninstall? I’m not running a database on these Mac’s - they’re just clients.
OK, so I did restore data onto the Mac Studio when I got it. I guess it’s just taken me this long to figure out that this problem exists. I could swear I had both open at the same time.
I just did a removal of the app, then searched for artifacts Roon leaves behind. I did discover a lot of files associated with Roon when I su’ed up to root and did a find on the root directory (so a find / with flags). I deleted everything out of the ~/Roon directory (yes I know that root has a different path than the user I log in as).
I’ll report back if manually wiping Roon from the filesystem and reinstalling resolves the issue. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I did use time machine’s backup of my Macbook to setup my Studio so I could see where there are hardcoded device names that would screw things up in this scenario.
However, I do want to highlight that Roon is leaving behind a TON of files after you remove it from the Applications folder. What’s being done about that?
Yes, Traian described what I was getting at. I didn’t want to get into a full rabbit hole discussion if that wasn’t the issue. Glad to see it got sorted!
Yup, definitely was the issue. Thanks again to you both.
I also posted the solution so that, hopefully, whomever comes across this doesn’t go to the extreme level as the user in the linked posting provided. They reinstalled everything from scratch and that takes a lot of time and effort when it’s just not necessary.
I will say that it’s a problem that Roon leaves so many artifacts on the filesystem after an “uninstall”. In fact, this used to be a big Windows problem in the past where applications polluted the registry and left files all over the place. Nowadays it’s not as bad. I’m surprised to see this happening. Can anyone explain what the justification for this is? Why hasn’t Roon done something about this? I just submitted another support request to see about fixing this. See https://community.roonlabs.com/t/roon-uninstall-on-mac-leaves-significant-artifacts-behind/242158 If you’re interested.
It’s a common thing on Mac but I don’t know if this is something Apple might even recommend. The disadvantage is what you found, the advantage of course is that uninstalling and reinstalling an app does not wipe the configuration. A theoretical option would be a dialog when uninstalling that asks what it should do, but I don’t know if the DMG installer format even provides this possibility - DMG contains the whole app in a folder, but this is per-user data that isn’t part of the app as such.