I recently moved to a new apartment and Roon iOS Remote has stopped working properly for me. I’m not certain if the issue is my new setup or a Roon software update.
When I’m playing music, the remote either loses connection with the server or becomes extremely slow. I often can’t even hit pause. I can live with it being a bit slow, but the lockups and disconnects make it unusable. The Mac continues to operate just fine with no noticeable slowness.
I have a very fast 802.11n wireless network. I know it is fast because I’ve run speed tests and can stream HD movies wirelessly to my AppleTV.
This issue happens even when I stream CD quality with no upsampling.
My Roon Server runs on a 2015 27” iMac (3.2GHz quad‑core Intel Core i5) with 24 gb RAM and a solid state drive. It is connected wirelessly over 802.11n.
I stream to a Senore Rendu (latest model, latest software). It has a wired connection to my cable modem/router.
I’ll leave the diagnosis to you, but it seems like maybe the thread the serves the remotes connection is getting starved by the playback thread.
Hopefully I’m wrong… I suspect that the server connected via wireless is the issue. I don’t doubt that you have enough bandwidth but there’s something about how Roon broadcasts it’s connection info to remotes that makes it perform badly via wireless with iOS remotes (in my situation at least). I had a similar set up, using my iMac as the server as it is the most powerful PC I have in the house but must be connected wirelessly. I would have regular loss of connections on iOS remotes, even seconds after successfully interacting using a remote it may drop out any not recover. Restarts of the server and remotes wouldn’t fix it. Turning off and on the wireless on both did fix it. Since then I have moved my Roon server to my Mac mini media centre and not had a single lost connection.
Is there any way to connect the iMac via Ethernet, even to test?
Thanks for the ideas. I guess I have a long cable somewhere that I can use to test, but my network really does have enough wireless bandwidth. Right now, the worst time of day to use wireless in my apartment building, I hit 41.7 Mbps download and 11.4 Mbps upload, to the internet. That is well more than enough for CD quality streaming. If I have to, I’ll buy a dedicated server for Roon that I can connect to my router, but obviously I really don’t want to spend the money unless I have to.
Can you go to your iMac Roon Server and hold down the option key 1st then place your cursor over the wifi icon in the system tray and click on it? Should see Open Wireless diagnostics. Select that. After that windows comes up go up to the top tool bar and select Window and Scan. This should show you your wifi access point and all near you. You can see what your RSSI strength is and also if you are on the same channels as others in your apt.
Could change your access point to a different channel if the one your on is congested.
Best bet is to change your access point, if capable , to 5GHZ since no one ever goes up to that band. Lose a little range but well worth it. I’m running 5GHZ in 3000 Sq house with no problems.
Thank you for the suggestions. I know Wifi is often the culprit in these situations, but that really should not be the case for me.I’m already running 5 GHz.
Here is what the Wireless Diagnostics say:
Quality Excellent
RSSI -55 dBm
Noise -96 dBm
Tx Rate 156 Mbps
One correction, I said earlier that my Mac is connected on 802.11n, but it is 802.11ac, in case that makes a difference.
I’m sitting here thinking of the hick ups I had. All my components are Apple; Mini, Mac Air etc.
I did have a problem on the Mini/server with the Apple firewall. I had some pausing issues with audio. Audio would start and stop. I had to hit the play button again.
Try disabling the firewall. You know where that is located? Sys Prefs>security
Ok I’ll take another shot. How about activity monitor and see what system status as to any system hogs. Time capsule is one that hits me sometimes in the audio area.
You are really going to have to temporarily plug it into ethernet to rule out that one change in your configuration, moving to wifi.
It might be router IGMP setting flaring up with all traffic on wifi or some other wifi setting that needs to be tweaked for Roon’s unique traffic, not a problem with the iMac or the latest Roon update.
Hey @Nick — Thanks for sharing your report with us!
I would like to echo some of the other suggestions mentioned here and suggest that you temporarily connect the iMac Core directly to your router via Ethernet. Doing so will definitely help us to narrow down what may be happening here.
May I also ask that you please verify the following:
For the iOS device and iMac Core are you using a 2.4ghz or 5ghz connection?
Do you have any active antivirus on the Core machine? If you disable it do you notice any improvements?
What type of endpoints are you using? Are they wireless as well?
What kind of router are you using?
We have some great information in our networking guide that I would recommend checking out as well.
I don’t have a long enough cable to test this. However, I feel quite certain that I have enough bandwidth that Roon should not be losing connectivity. At a minimum, I should be able to hit stop/pause, etc. Consider:
I can stream from CD quality up to 192K without issue. Yet at 44.1K, Roon remote stops working.
I can stream audio to my end-point and video to my AppleTV at the same time. The video is a bit choppy, but is basically ok.
When I’m steaming audio or video, my iPad remains fully responsive and can browse web sites without issue, but my Roon remote does not work.
It is really clear to me that iOS Roon remote performs very poorly in low-bandwidth situations. Blanket blaming of Wifi is taking the easy way out and ignores the real issue. I see lots of other reports of the iOS remotes losing connectivity.
Let’s say I go out and buy a long cable and everything works. That is what I expect, since I did not have this issue until I moved to Wifi. What have we proved? Not that my Wifi is necessarily too slow, but just that Roon works better on a wired connection. Roon should look into why people are having issues on Wifi instead. Clearly I have the bandwidth for heartbeat msgs and basic commands. I probably have the bandwidth for slow album browsing. Remember, while music is playing, I can browse the web, stream video, etc. I just can’t use Roon remote. So instead of just saying: its because of Wifi, how about looking into why Roon remote does not work correctly in these situations.
Thank you for the updated information, and apologies for the continued troubles.
In the past we have certainly seen these types of issues connected to WiFi, but we do have customers who use this type of setup without any issues. We recommend that you use a wired connection for optimal performance, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t connect using WiFi.
By performing this test, either with a long cable or moving the Core machine closer to the router, will allow us to verify that WiFi performance is in fact the issue here. With this known we can look into why this may be happening with your setup. If using a wired connection doesn’t work as expected, then we know that we may need to look into other possible troubleshooting options.
There may be settings on the router, such as IGMP settings as mentioned above, router firewall settings, settings that may be throttling connection between devices on the network, or settings involving multicast and broadcast traffic, that are playing into this and may be improved with settings changes.
When the problem occurs, are you able to access the Core machine over the network from other devices?