What is one to do with this dreaded circumstance? It has been happening far too long with no indication that it is being addressed by our good Roon doctors or if there will ever be a cure. They say humor is the best medicine, but there is nothing funny about being deep in the throws of musical bliss to have it all cut short by the intermittent yet consistent skipping of tracks since the dawn of 1.8.
With this lack of a cure, I’ve decided to turn to a release that will help ease my frustration by sharing the ride I take every day, often every hour, that never occurred before 1.8. Perhaps it is my old age. When I was just a young 1.7 I never had this problem. Now I’m an old 1.8 I am frustrated all the time. Do I need a pill?
Irony is a funny thing and I’ll start off with a nice slow funky song I love by Angus Stone from his Broken Brights album and the song is called “End of the World.” I LOVE this song, and as it came up in my playlist I was grooving with it so nicely until BANG, the track stopped and off we went to the next song. How frustrating! For any of you who have not heard this song, please give it a try. It is great. Hopefully it will play all the way through for you.
This series of ruminations will certainly continue. I’ve already got more lined up. I won’t do it for every song that gets interrupted half way through. I don’t have time to post that often…and I hope and pray that the Roon doctors will fix this soon so I can stop the meds and enjoy the intimacy of my music once again. If not, well, it just might be the end of the world.
The Adam Ezra Group is a folk rock band from Boston, Massachusetts. You won’t get that information from Roon. Interestingly, this group does not get any kind of background information in the “Overview” section of Roon. That fact does not drive me to drink. However when listing to the very nice song, “You Speak Gril” on their live album, "Better Than Bootleg, VOL3 which is well produced, then BANG, interruptus hits once again and off to the next song in my playlist we go, and as I attempt to recover from the shock, I reach for another glass of bourbon.
No longer will the Roon Doctors be able to help me. I’ll need to see my primary care physician or perhaps join AA. Music should alleviate the frustrations of life and reduce my need to self-medicate. But as I wait for the interruptus issue to be resolve, I’ll have to keep reaching for some Bootleg and hope my liver holds up.
So we can better assist you, please provide a brief description of your current setup using this link as a guide.
Make sure to describe your network configuration/topology, including any networking hardware currently in use, so we can have a clear understanding of how your devices are communicating.
I’ve done this all before to no avail, but we’ll give it the old college try again…
Describe The Issue
Ever since the new version 1.8 there has been a skipping of tracks issue that has been widly reported by multiple users. This never happened before version 1.8 or if it happened it was very rare and never noticed. Now, the skipping of tracks can happen every 10-20 songs. They are all from TIDAL and none from tracks that are on my local drive. The track will stop playing somewhere in the middle of the song and then jump to the next track. If I use the back button and reply that track it usually does not skip the second time through although it has happened once or twice.
Describe Your Setup
My Roon Core is on a Synology DS 1618+ with a quad core INTEL Atom C3538 and 8MB or RAM. I have a 256 SSD for the Roon Database hooked up to a USB Port to the Disk Station. Everything is streamed using wi-fi. It does not matter which device I stream to. They all will skip. I have NAD C368, Oppo UDP-205, and Chrome Audio. The WiFi is through a Synology RT2600ac Router. My music is stored on the Disk Station spinning disks. Roon build is 1.8 790. Again, this was not a problem before version 1.8
I will add to this that I do not use DSP and that my Internet Connection is 500Mbps. Nothing on my end has changed since Roon 1.7.
Stevie Wonder has had so many great songs that his collections are usually all hits. In this case, his "The Definitive Collection from 2002 is one where you can’t go wrong and one of my favorites is the song, “I Wish.”
Well, with such a happy grove, you’d hope I could listen to this one from beginning to end, but NO! BANG, cut off mid-stream and off to the next song. I wish I could be happy with the joy the day would bring, but the interruptus kinda sucks-us. This all makes me wish those days of 1.7 would come back once more. Why did those days have to go. Cue the Fender Rhodes piano. Those who know the lyrics will know what I’m talking about.
All entries are actual songs that have skipped, I’m not making any of this stuff up.
I have the same problem. Happens with both TIDAL and Qobuz for me. I have read so many posts about this and in most of them, the devs/support seem to be gaslighting us, mainly telling us it’s our network. I have been a victim of this. I even said so in my earlier posts. But after optimizing my network, I can say for sure it’s not my network’s problem. It’s Roon. Let’s start with that at the very least.
The medical condition know as Roon Interruptus continues unabated with no cure in sight. I’ll be checking with the Roon Doctors to let them know I Want a New Drug.
Which is about as good a segue as I can get, for the first case of interruptus today. This case came while listening to Huey Lewis & the News from his Sports album.
All entries are actual songs that have skipped, I’m not making any of this stuff up.
…and so it continues. The interruptus that seems eternal. This time it is a title song from the Eagles called, “On the Border.” BOOM! off to the next track way before I was ready. Can’t my tunes play all the way through? What can I do? For now I’m going to try to turn some water into wine.
Does this happen whenever you play each of these specific tracks, or just on one occasion with each of them?
How often are tracks interrupted? Does it happen every time (or virtually every time) you play a track, every 2nd or 3rd time or just once or twice in a listening session. When you use a playlist or Roon Radio does the problem occur near the start of your playlist or does the problem only occur after you have been playing the playlist for some time? If it only happens after some time, could it be a cache related issue?
Luckily for me, I don’t experience this problem on my systems, and each of these tracks play fully when I listen to them. Now, this is not of much help to you other than to point out that it is not a generic problem with either Roon or Tidal.
For what it’s worth, I run Roon ROCK on an Intel NUC (8i5), and use my Synology NAS only to store my locally ripped CDs, and I use either Win10 or iPAD to control my music playback.
Mostly this happens on one occasion, although the Huey Lewis song it happened twice in a row. When it happens I go back and play the track again and it almost always plays through just fine.
Roon Radio often loses control of the audio device at first start up. But on the second attempt it plays just fine. I can live with that.
This issue is this never happened before Roon 1.8. Nothing on my end changed. Either Roon, TIDAL, or perhaps my Internet provider which is Wide Open West are causing the issue. It happens enough to be a real pain and is something that needs to be resolved. Since it started happening with Roon 1.8 that is my best guess, but a change with TIDAL or my Internet provider that perhaps could have happened at the same time that 1.8 came out could be an explanation.
Music is an important part of my life. I studied it in college, and nowadays I go to live performances as much as possible when the performance is in the right venue. In the case of Steely Dan, that group played a few years back at Ravinia just north of Chicago. A full 16 piece band took the stage and gave one of the best performance I’ve heard. Most people know the genius behind Donald Fagen, but there is Walter Becker who was the other half of the genius of Steely Dan.
Walter Becker has done some of his own albums and they are good. So when my playlist cued up the song Hard Up Case from the album 11 Tracks of Whack, you know I was enthusiastic…but…then…BANG! Interruptus hit and prematurely took all the fun away. I have noticed that all these albums the skip seem to be MQA files. Don’t know if that has anything to do with it. I’m hoping the Roon Doctors will find a cure soon.
Maybe Roon folks are too kind to tell you, but Intel Atom or WiFi to core (and less so to endpoints) are underspec for Roon. In particular, WiFi can drop packets because of collisions with other nearby WiFi networks, and Roon hates that.
Perhaps, but before 1.8 this was never an issue. If it worked just fine before, what has changed now? Does 1.8 have greater requirements on resources? If so, just say it. Also, streaming is what everyone does. Not many houses have a cabled backbone to every room in a house. My 4K HD TV streams Netflix, Disney+ and all others just fine with no hickups. Everything else works just fine on wifi too. Yes, I’m aware I am underspec. That is why I made sure to have the additional RAM and the database on a SSD. To make sure everything else was in spec, and once again, it worked just fine with 1.7.
Another thing to keep in mind: Roon is not static. It will receive software updates over time, and as always, we’re going to continue pushing the functionality forward as hardware improves. Buying something that’s just barely sufficient today is a recipe for a sub-par experience in a year. Likewise, the hardware we’ll be recommending six months from now (April 10, 2015) will be six months better than what we’re recommending today.
Right, subpar means slow loading of the visual elements which I experience and accept because of my core. At the same time, Roon states streaming the actual music is the easy part and that is why the music files on spinning disks is just fine. Now, yesterday Roon played fairly well with only one skip all day. Today, no skips so far. We could speculate all day what causes this. What I hope to hear from Roon is specifically what has changed that is causing this change in performance.
I am a customer, not an employee. I am also a NAS-user. I own a 7th gen NUC and use ROCK as my core. Preferred wire connections for my music playback. When the Wifi is marginal, drop outs occur. They drive me crazy too. I eventually plan to have all Roon playback over ethernet. If you have more funds, buy a Nucleus. Invest in a better LAN with ethernet. You’ll enjoy your music playback more. You mention the tracks are from TIDAL, make sure your ISP is providing enough bandwidth and you have a powerful enough router.
I appreciate all the advice, but most of this I understand well and have it covered. I have both Synology RT2600ac and two Synology MR2200ac to extend my wifi. Some of the better devices in the business and I check the dashboard and test wifi throughout my house. It is strong everywhere and rock solid. Which is to say I have WOW 500Mbps Download and 50Mbps upload internet. I did this not for Roon so much as we have a great home theater 4k setup and my son does video editing work so he’s transferring a lot of large files to the NAS, and the work from home world we’re all in demands solid internet. Everything seems to run very smooth. While Internet can go down or slow down from time to time, I can easily see when that happens and know where the problem is. Generally, my Internet and wi-fi is not the issue.
As for the core, I will at some point add a NUC, but my understanding it will speed up the loading of tracks and playlist, make the UI snappy fast, but that is different from dropping tracks as I understand it.
The Core should be wired. Since all music is streamed through the Core, if you play something from a streaming service (or from music on a network source and not local to the core), the music is streamed from the source, over the network to the core, then processed to PCM (which is larger than the incoming data, btw) and then sent back OUT to the endpoint(s).
Having the core on Wifi, or a local source of music on a Wifi hop to the core, can strain a Wifi network.
Processor is still underspec, and USB SSD is not ideal either. The minimum system I’ve run successfully had an I5 NUC with 8GB and M.2 SSD, with music served from a Synology NAS. NUC, NAS, and router wired; most endpoints wired. The only WiFi endpoint I’ve owned is great 95% of the time, but it can stutter when the neighborhood WiFi traffic gets really heavy. At another location, fairly isolated house, I ran a Linn endpoint wireless for months without any issues. It all depends on the local WiFi environment.
