I bought a nucleus and roon lifetime. I have to say I love it overall. BUT this program or the nucleus, who knows really is such a hit and miss affair. I had a party with some friends and was showing them how cool this is. Had my laptop out and on the back patio with airplay to my system out there. We were doing guess this song it was awesome and then the slowness kicked in slower and slower the guests were like what is wrong it’s really slow. So guess what ended up happening? Had to switch to the old standby. Spotify via airplay. Worked perfect all night. I certainly didn’t mention I had paid a chunk of dough for the nucleus and this super expensive program that doesn’t always work. I’m willing to put up with the quirks to get the nice sound but really it’s kind of embarrassing. I’m kind of scared to invite my audiophile buddy over for fear that it’s going to act like a turd when he is here.
So basically you have run into issues when using Roon. Seems like there might be a networking issue at hand. In my opinion you could have started a bug report first (to try to actually solve the problem) before you posted a not very constructive rant.
No there has been ongoing issues with Roons search speed since the introduction of 1.6 and it’s affected lots of people. It was especially bad this weekend and earlier in the week it droped to being over a minute to find material. This was down to one of their tech team breaking something whilst trying to speed it up. They admitted this on the forum. It was fixed the same day.
There has been ongoing issues with search since 1.6 you are not alone. See my post above. Overall it has been better recently but not stellar. I have an ongoing ticket about it.
I am much aware of the issues since 1.6.
There is not a networking issue. It’s only Roon. Everything else works just fine. It’s got a mind of it’s own and that is basically what I have accepted. It’s an embarrassment really but I still am willing to put up with it for the sound quality alone. Maybe if enough of us rant about our experiences they will get it fixed. Obviously I’m not alone. Seems that if I’m not right in front of the computer to restart it or mess with it you can’t rely on it to just work, like play music for a party. When it’s come to those things I have to trust spotify and airfoil. That works great no issues and I can airplay to multiple spots and it never fails me.
This isn’t really how it works --networking problems can happen when a certain amount of bandwidth is required, or when certain communication protocols are needed, and different applications are going to have different requirements.
In any event, it definitely sounds like something is going wrong here and you’re not seeing the same kind of stability other Nucleus users are seeing. Our @support team can help investigating this, Ryan, so we can make sure the next party goes off without a hitch.
A thread in #support with the details listed here would be a great start.
We appreciate the feedback, and look forward to getting this 100% stable for you.
Just because Spotify streaming works does not necessarily mean the issue you are experiencing is an error on the Roon side of things. It could very well be a lacking router, switch or network player (insert random network related object) that is causing these issues… Hence my advise to contact support.
My point exactly.
Well… I keep hearing variants of this, and my reaction is, “Huh – Spotify seems to be engineered to work on the networks people actually have, and Roon doesn’t seem to be. Wonder what Spotify engineers know that Roon engineers don’t?” Really, streaming from a Nucleus over AirPlay can’t be all that different from streaming from a Spotify server over AirPlay, can it?
Could just be a 1.6 bug, though. All software has bugs.
By the way, I run Roon core on a NAS right now, and I’ve never had these problems. Of course, all my music is local – no Tidal or Qobuz.
Spotify comes from the internet and lands at a local host - the way internet traffic does - and exactly how ISP routers are optimized. Roon requires local host to host performance… just a thought.
Personally Ryan is in his rights to rant. Overall since January Roons performance has been sub par and has at times been frankly embarrassing. It has improved this week with the latest tweak that brought the whole search engine to it’s knees first nice one tech team. It needs sorting, trying to Palm it off on a customers network is not on. When you have invested in a product of this price you expect the best. It’s a luxury item with a high price tag and should do what it says on the tin.
You seem to fancy being a bit dramatic @CrystalGipsy. After the very rough 1.6 release, it has been stable enough for everyday use for quite some weeks now.
Yeah it can be very different. It is different, in fact. Roon is massaging it’s database on your computer constantly, it’s updating graphics, and it’s also streaming data. It is a resource hog. It’s built that way. So if your computer isn’t up to do (Ryan’s Nucleus is) or there is a problem in your network, you can run into problems other lighter programs don’t. If the problems aren’t corrected, they can come back and literally spoil the party. If a user is seeing lots of slow downs in a Nucleus, there is clearly something not right elsewhere in the system and it has to get diagnosed and fixed. It can’t happen unless the user posts the necessary aspects of their entire system in Support and grinds through this issue with their help.
Ryan has had intermittent problems for months, which I’m sure is frustrating. But they can only get resolved by systematically working through whatever the root of the problem is.
No it’s just gone on long enough It’s six months ago it started it should be well behind us but it’s not.
Yeah, and I’m sure Spotify’s servers are also doing that in the cloud. But, more to the point, maybe Roon shouldn’t be doing that. I don’t know. This is a design choice, and Roon may have made one that doesn’t fit consumer networks.
Or maybe the thing that Spotify engineers know which Roon engineers don’t is that programs don’t have to work right all the time. Sussman has a talk about propagators (an “eventual consistency” model) where he points out that Google search results sometimes aren’t right, but people use Google to search anyway. In many cases it’s more important for things to work acceptably, than for them to work right. This may be one of them.
Also Roon server decompresses and processes (if required) audio data and moves an uncompressed PCM stream across your network. I suspect in most cases Spotify streams a compressed mp3 (or whatever) and allows the end point to do the decoding.The PCM stream will have higher bandwidth requirements.
Yes, that’s a good point.
Ryan
Can I ask if you’re using Tidal, Qobuz, or both. I’m the latter and have to say I think it’s been slower since I added Qobuz. Stress think, I’m not sure, hence asking
Phil
I have to say I was fully in Ryan Stratton’s boat with this issue but you gave me another perspective that changed my mind, Bill. Perhaps Roon created a system that was ahead of consumer infrastructure and made a business assumption that they could make it work “acceptably” in the short term and “perfectly” when other consumer network devices eventually improved with time.