Thank you again for your detailed response and for having the development team review this.
Because I am obviously not a Roon or macOS engineer, I asked ChatGPT to undertake a detailed independent analysis of the Terminal output and macOS logs from the 3:51 p.m. EDT playback failure that I sent you yesterday. I am copying its analysis below in its own words because it identified several things that appear potentially useful to your engineers:
Benjamin,
I reviewed Evan’s complete diagnostic output from the 3:51 p.m. playback failure, including the continuous RAATServer process monitoring, the macOS unified-log output immediately after the stoppage, the DiagnosticReports listing, and the inventory of system extensions and background processes.
The most significant finding I see is that RAATServer was neither killed nor obviously suspended when playback stopped.
During the captured failure, RAATServer remained running under the same PID, 39029, throughout. Its process state remained S. It did not disappear, report GONE, relaunch under a different PID, or enter the T state that would indicate process suspension.
That appears to eliminate two of the three diagnostic possibilities you had outlined:
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RAATServer being killed and relaunched; and
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RAATServer being suspended wholesale by something such as a CPU-management utility.
The captured event therefore appears to fall into your third category: the RAATServer process remains alive, but something inside or underneath the audio session stalls or changes state.
The macOS logs at approximately 15:51:24, essentially contemporaneous with the playback failure, seem particularly significant.
They show CoreAudio changing the RAATServer session to:
output_running = 0
and macOS subsequently records the RAATServer/CoreMedia session as “stopping playing,” becoming inactive, and being removed from the active audio-session state.
At essentially the same time, RunningBoard records invalidation of assertions associated with RAATServer. One of the entries appears to show RAATServer itself requesting invalidation of an assertion.
Yet RAATServer itself remains alive throughout this sequence.
The subsequent RunningBoard records are also interesting because macOS expressly reports that this RAATServer process is not lifecycle-managed and that suspension and CPU-limit changes are being ignored. I also found no corresponding RAATServer or RoonServer crash report generated at the time of the 3:51 failure.
My interpretation, with the important qualification that I do not have access to Roon’s source code, is therefore:
The process itself survives, but the active RAAT/CoreAudio audio session is being torn down, abandoned, stalled, or otherwise transitioned to an inactive state.
That strikes me as materially different from an outside application simply terminating or suspending RAATServer.
It does not prove that Roon itself initiates the original failure. An external component could conceivably cause a condition to which RAATServer then responds by shutting down its audio session. But the evidence seems compatible with several possibilities that reside within or very near the RAAT/CoreAudio interaction itself—for example:
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an internal RAATServer thread stall or deadlock;
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a lock or resource wait;
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a CoreAudio session-state transition that RAATServer fails to recover from;
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an audio-session teardown/reinitialization race;
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or an external interruption that RAATServer handles incorrectly.
I would therefore hesitate to conclude from these data that the original trigger necessarily “lives on the Mac side.” The evidence captured at 3:51 seems capable of supporting either an external trigger or an internal RAAT/CoreAudio state-management problem.
There is one additional clarification concerning App Tamer. Although App Tamer components happened to appear in the latest launchctl inventory, Evan has advised me that Roon has already exhibited the identical playback failure during prior testing when App Tamer had been completely removed/absent. Accordingly, App Tamer does not appear capable of explaining the underlying problem. In addition, during this particular captured failure RAATServer never entered the T suspended state that you specifically identified as the expected signature of such throttling.
There are certainly numerous other third-party processes and extensions installed on the machine, including several network/security/background utilities, so I would not exclude external interference merely from this evidence.
However, given the unusually clean capture of the 3:51 failure, I think a higher-value next diagnostic step might be to examine what RAATServer’s threads are actually doing while the process remains alive but playback is dead, rather than continuing primarily through elimination of unrelated applications.
For example, if your engineers can provide an appropriate procedure for obtaining a process sample, spindump, thread dump, enhanced RAAT diagnostic logging, or diagnostic-build output at the moment playback has stopped, that may allow them to determine whether RAATServer is blocked on a particular thread, lock, system call, CoreAudio operation, socket operation, or other resource.
There are two additional facts I would keep in mind.
First, this failure does occur in the middle of tracks, not merely at track boundaries. Evan specifically captured and reported the 3:51 occurrence as an in-song failure. Therefore, although track transitions may make the condition easier to provoke, the underlying mechanism does not appear confined to stream teardown/recreation between songs.
Second, you have separately identified a confirmed Roon defect after the original session failure: Roon repeatedly attempts to reconnect to the same dead session without appropriate backoff or reconstruction, producing hundreds of retries and ultimately requiring the processes to be force-quit. Fixing that defect will not necessarily cure the original interruption, as you explained, but it should substantially improve Roon’s ability to recover when an interruption does occur.
The question I would therefore put most directly to the development team is:
What does the 15:51:24 sequence tell you about why the RAAT audio session transitions to inactive/output_running=0 while RAATServer itself remains alive, under the same PID, and unsuspended?
If your internal RAAT logs can be correlated to that precise timestamp, I suspect that is now one of the most promising places to look.
I hope this analysis is useful to the engineering team.
— ChatGPT (GPT-5.6 Sol), based on the diagnostic materials Evan provided
Benjamin, I hope the above is helpful. If your engineers would like me to capture a process sample, spindump or other specific diagnostic the next time playback stops, please send me the exact procedure or command and I will be happy to do so.
Thank you again for your and the development team’s continued attention to this. I very much appreciate it and hope the 3:51 p.m. capture helps get us closer to identifying the underlying cause.
