Roon is unable to play a source X that other players play as a breeze

Quite often, Roon explains in orange that “roon has a problem loading a file, it loads slowly, something with the wireless connection?, etc”. I don’t have the exact phrase at hand.

This happens time and time again. The problem is, that other players, like MediaPlayer Home Cinema, can play the exact same music track (same file) without any error. This competing player has not reported one single error in my 2-3 roon years. In the same timeperiod, Roon has reported this “slow loading” error many hundred times. To be frank, it is deeply annoying, and I consider it a very core/basic feature to be able to play wirelessly any fileformet.

I have run Roon and Mediaplayer Classic Home Cinema in paralell to test this. Roon has this error, while in the exact same second, Mediaplayer plays without errors. I have tested with high res dsd. In other words, there is (seldom) anything wrong with our network. It is Roon that has the trouble!

Could I suggest to the Roon team that you take this error, reported many times, seriously, and find the cause of this error? One could suspect that the RAAT protocol is much more vulnerable than alternative protocols, be it airplay or chromecast or whatever but that is just a customers loose guess.

To put things in contrast, MediaPlayer home cinema is a free product.

Hope to see a solution soon

The first question that Roon support or anyone should ask: Are you still running Roon on a older machine that falls short of minimum recommended specs?

AJ

No. This is a general problem on both that vintage mac that you point to, and on my currenct working horse laptop, the Samsung Ativ 9+ (i5). I was using the latter as I experienced this problem again yesterday, and I think we can agree that this pc qualify in for Roon usage.

The problem as seen from user perspective is that Roon sometimes has trouble loading an audio stream.

What part does WiFi play in your setup?

Wifi between Roon Server and the clients. USB drive with music connected to Server. Other mediaplayers also use wifi (without problems). The router is asus rt66… should be good, but does have its peculiarities in that it can run stable for weeks, then have several hickups in one week. However, again, the reference is the other mediaplayers not having problems with keeping a steady stream from that wifi connected LAN music source

What do you mean by clients ? WiFi between Core and Outputs can be problematic. WiFi between Core and Controls shouldn’t be a problem.

Hi Carl. Hard wiring my hardware was the best thing I did. The vast majority of issues I had seen vanished when I did that. I know it doesn’t suit everyone and I also know it wasn’t an issue when I used LMS but having made the switch to Roon I made my network fit Roon and not the other way around.

Absolutely agree that hard wiring is better, yes. Impossible here at the moment. But I do repeat that I do not experience problems with other players, so I find it kind of important that this is defined as an unresolved issue that could be worked on.

Understood.

Hi @Carl_Henrik_Janson ---- Thank you for the report and sharing this observation with us. The insight is appreciated!

Moving forward, if you are able to reliable reproduce this behavior (i.e “roon has a problem loading a file”) may I very kindly ask you to do so and note the time of day when the observation was made. Once I have a sense as to when the issue occurred I will go ahead and enable diagnostics on your account so we can try to get a better sense as to why you are experiencing this behavior on your setup.

-Eric

Yes, indeed, this problem is a nightmare. I did a test yesterday running 4 Roon remotes all playing CD from the local music library connected to Roon server as a USB HDD. In parallel, I played from the same source via the MediaPlayerClassic HomeCinema, on one of those roon remotes. While Roon remotes was “slowly loading” perhaps 20 times during an hour of test, always in a broadcasted manner across all four units, the other player was flawless. Same with Tidal.

I then ran an overnight test of this testbed with not so good results for Roon. I captured all this on a videocamera, but before I send that, your question put me into a more thorough analysis of the whole setup. Let me finish that process first, and then you will hear from me. (to possibly save you time and solve my problem).

@Eric, take a look at this video showing 3 roon remotes playing late at night (no wifi competition), then attacked in a broadcast by the “a file is loading slowly” message. In the background, you can hear mediaplayer classic playing via Wifi without problems, on one of those Roon remotes, and from the HDD that is USB connected to the Roon Core/Server. IOW, same wifi path. The 3 roon remotes was deliberately on different wifi networks (2.4 and 5 as well as an extender)

I first ran a test with only one roon remote, same problem.

I then ran a test for 2 x 4 hours and will present results, but first I will triple check everything and every component involved. Even if the video could show a certain borderline vulnerability in Roon if the going gets tough on the wifi, I am at the moment looking elswhere for the cause of trouble.

On the Roon Core, I have reinstalled windows and dropped Audiophile Optimiser, and I have disabled the 2.4GHz wifi because it is impossible to tell Windows to “forget” those network. And more.

At the moment, 3 remotes + the core are playing without problems for an hour on the revamped Roon Core. This is a Samsung Ativ 9 (a 9+ takedown but approx same engine). It shows less than 3% cpu roon usage in this testbed, so it should handle the task.

A summary report to be expected after further studies.

The Video link: https://1drv.ms/v/s!AgwTOVHwFIUih847lQZfd64geADEoQ