Initial test after changing Kitchen from RoPiee to Mac mini stopped after 1d 13h 6m 56s due to “Too many dropouts”
The Kitchen Mac mini is also the one we use for the home cinema so stopped the next test to watch some video.
Started streaming again and it stopped after 49s “Track Stopped Due to Error”
Restarted and it’s now streaming again.
Will update again if it continues for 2 days or falls over again!
What is becoming clear is that there are various technical reasons for the streaming radio service to drop out.
As a consumer of the service, I don’t care about these problems, I just want it to keep doing what I asked, which is play streaming radio until I tell it to stop. If it stops without me asking then it has failed and I’m unhappy.
I note that every time it drops out, all I have to do is click on the play button again and it usually successfully starts playing again. That could be only a few seconds after the system has stopped.
So my request is that the Roon system should be a lot more tolerant of the various “too many dropouts” or “client refused connection” type errors. The system should not give up. It should tell the user there is a problem but should keep trying to reinstate the streaming service until the user tells it to stop.
As a Systems Engineer by profession, I am convinced that any entertainment system should keep on trying to do what the user last requested. It might have to shut down for a while because of some technical problem but should resume when that problem has gone away. Once a system has stopped, the user will notice and complain. If the system hiccups and resumes the users will be much less likely to complain, they may not even notice!
It is different for safety critical systems where the system restarting unexpectedly could be hazardous e.g power tools or airport luggage belts. But there is no way Roon can be considered personally hazardous!
Hi @Adrian_Berry,
We quite agree. There’s a ticket in the pipeline to extend the retry interval for live radio so dropouts don’t interrupt playback as easily. This would more closely resemble Roon’s own download service for streaming or local playback, which has a robust retry mechanism, with a few exceptions:
Roon will always be subject to the network’s ability to reach and resolve the URL addresses for HTTP streaming reliably. Significantly, there is no local caching, so if a request continues to fail, the audio stream must eventually stop once the last received segment is played. Finally, ff the station makes changes to their URL, their broadcasting, etc., Roon also can’t adapt to these in real-time.
We’ll request a status update on the aforementioned effort to extend HLS retry intervals. Please stand by and we’ll share more information here.
After many days running and several system configurations, including doing A - B - A tests. I can now conclude;
3 RoPiee endpoints drops out after a variable period of time - a few seconds to over a day.
2 Ropiee endpoints and a single Mac mini endpoint drops out after a variable period of time - a few seconds to over a day.
1 RoPiee endpoint and 2 Mac mini endpoints does not drop out - streamed non stop for nearly 3 days before I manually terminated the streaming radio session.
The start of the shutdown is a log file message saying “Lost client connection” or “failed to connect Connection refused”.
I think it’s always the RoPiee with the lowest IP address causing the “Lost client connection” issue. Swapping physical locations makes no difference, it is the lowest IP that causes the problem.
I wonder if the RoPiees are trying to talk to each other and missing Roon Server requests?
Hi @Adrian_Berry ,
That’s an interesting observation. If you try to set Reserved IP address in your router for the Ropieee’s does that change anything?
Tried the obvious next combination; I replaced the final RoPiee with a Mac mini. It streamed for 0d 1h 45m 14s before dropping out with the “lost client connection” message.
So I now have no ideas about why the system keeps on falling over with the same error messages.
Am I expecting too much for Roon to be able to play internet radio continuously without dropping out? But Safari can do it so why not Roon?
I’ll have a look over the weekend. But given everything else I’ve tried so far, including completely rebuilding all the RoPiees from scratch and now sequentially replacing all of them with Apple Macs (which is where I started off back in January this year) and getting the same failures, I don’t think it will make any difference. It might change the physical device that causes the problem but will not eliminate the root cause.
It feels to me like Roon or RoonBridge is getting hung up in some way. Because when it drops out, Roon has been trying for several seconds to re-establish the connection. It has 5 goes and then gives up. But if you immediately restart by clicking on the play button, the system quite happily starts playing and will continue for hours. It’s got into some dead end loop.
My whole system is hard wired with CAT5e cable. I’ve tried all sorts of different wiring arrangements, missing out switches etc. All to no avail, it still drops out. I’m sure that if I had all 3 endpoints sat side by side next to my router and connected up with 0.5m cables, it would still drop out. Hmm, might try that over the weekend!
Update:- 10/05/2025 09:28 BST set the Router to use fixed IP addresses for all the Roon devices