Roon playing Tidal tracks halfway through, skips to next song constantly

I am playing Tidal HIFI tracks through Roon with a 2013 Mac Mini as a Core and an Oppo 205 as an endpoint/zone.

90% of the time I select a song, it takes 20-30 seconds for the song to appear, then it plays about 30-40 seconds of the song, then jumps to the next track. Most of the time it does this with the next track as well, until it finds a track it “likes” and plays that all the way through.

Related, sometimes I select tracks and it waits 20-30 seconds then tells me the song is not available on Tidal.

I am controlling the Core with an iOS Roon app on an iPhone X. This behavior also exists on playback from iPhone with the iPhone X as the zone.

I cannot verify but it does seem it’s skipping the same songs most of the time.

I am able to play Tidal just fine on both desktop and mobile apps outside of Roon.

I’m experiencing this about 90% of the time over the past week which is making Roon just about unusable.

Roon Core is a 2013 Mac Mini running nothing but Roon and Tidal desktop, running Roon Version 1.5 Build 334 stable, 64 bit.

Roon on iPhone is 1.5 build 333.

The Mac Mini is connected via wifi to the Oppo endpoint, and I am having no connectivity issues with any other devices or apps. I am running HDMI between the Mini and Anthem MRX 720 to use my TV as a monitor when I need access to the desktop interface.

I have disabled the Tidal account in the Roon Core and re-enabled it, and also deleted my Roon cache file, with no improvement.

Any help is appreciated.

Hey @Jeremey_Hunsicker — Thanks for sharing your detailed report with us!

Are there any patterns that you’ve noticed in what is being skipped? Does it tend to be certain sample rates? MQA? Any other qualities about these tracks that skip that you’ve noticed?

If you play directly to the Mac Mini’s system output, or any device connected directly to the Mac Mini, do you notice the same behavior? How is the Mac Mini connected to the network?

When did you first notice this behavior occurring? Were there any changes to your setup around when you noticed this?

Just to confirm, are local tracks playing without issue?

Thanks!
Dylan

Roon is often not wifi friendly, try to hard wire

Something similar that I’ve seen but maybe not related.
If I’m say playing tidal via roon, and then pause it for a long time,
at least sometimes
when I try to restart playback, it tries and fails to play any songs, skipping one to the other without any audio output
as if it’s connection to tidal timed out and it can’t reconnect automatically
To solve this I’ve needed to restart roon

There is no pattern to it.

Example… just this afternoon, opened Roon on iPhone and selected Oppo 205 zone. Started playing from my main playlist…

Play song # 1… after about 20 seconds of silence, Roon jumps to song #2 and starts playing that instead.

After song #2 plays for a few seconds, I select song #1 again and this time it plays.

Select song #4… says the song is not available on Tidal on my Roon iOS app, and skips to the next song (which is on the same album as song #4)

Select song #6… starts playing properly and then works for about 2 minutes. My phone is sitting next to me, then mid-song I pick it up and Roon opens, it stops playing song #6 abruptly and skips to song #7 (with no input from me).

Then I select song #8 and it sits for about 20 seconds, and starts playing. The cover art is missing on this song on the Oppo 205’s video output.

I hope that is not too confusing, but that’s a perfect example of what I’ve been experiencing over the past 3-4 days.

I am not very patient when it comes to networks, DNS settings, programming backend scripts, etc… It seems like there’s some kind of conflict with Tidal and Roon, so before I start drilling holes in walls to run new network cable or resetting router settings, it seems like the easiest thing to do would be just delete Roon from the Core, delete the Tidal app, and reinstall everything and see if I have the same problems.

Want to mention here my follow up… problem solved (so far) by rebooting my Orbi router, after which I discovered a Netgear firmware that was necessary to install. I moved the Orbi satellite within reach of the Mac Mini and plugged in directly via ethernet. I’m also using the USB out to the USB DAC input of my Oppo 205 to stream directly from the Mac Mini instead of using the Oppo as an endpoint.

So far so good!

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