Tidal, Qobuz, and Roon have been working perfectly for me since I purchased a Nucleus in late November and got everything connected by ethernet and/or HDMI. I think it must be network related or location related. I’m in SE USA and have AT&T U-Verse 50/12 internet. I have no issues streaming 192/24 from Qobuz and MQA from Tidal.
For me it has worked mostly well, too. Even, when my ISP in a rural are of Colombia had during several weeks problems with a fiber cable run from the capital out here. But, there are the occasional hiccups when the Tidal track stops after 30-40 seconds and skips to the next one, which then is being downloaded and buffered, and maybe reproduced entirely well, or maybe skipping once more. And this has nothing to do with my home network, nor with my Internet connection. After all, the track is being downloaded and buffered perfectly well.
And while I am happy @Jim_F that you have no problems whatsoever, on this forum there are enough support requests pertaining this same behavior while streaming. Something is not entirely ok.
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Mine is on Ubuntu server, so if ever Tidal hiccups once more, I’ll have a look at the logs. Until now, this hasn’t me bothered enough to make a fuss about it, but, as stated before, I can understand others’ frustration.
I’m not implying there is no problem. I am saying I think the problem is network related, IDK. The fact that Tidal, Qobuz, and Roon work perfectly for 1000’s of users makes me think the issue might not be Roon, but a user’s network, either in the house or their ISP.
I spent half an hour today comparing download speeds for Tidal direct versus Tidal via Roon. There is a marked difference in the download speeds for each service. Tidal seems to cap direct downloads at around 10 Mbps - even for high resolution files - throughout the duration of the track. On the same Tidal track streamed via Roon, the download speed to my router peaks (today) at around 100 Mbps. Depending on the duration of the track, the Roon download is complete 5-20 seconds after it starts. This seems then to be a choice that Roon is making, not a limitation imposed by Tidal (since it limits direct user downloads to my PC-resident Tidal application to ~ 10 Mbps).
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I found a year-old post from Roon technical support regarding a similar issue of interest:
It is possible that direct streaming from Qobuz/Pandora/Spotify do not take up as much bandwidth or the apps have an “adaptive bandwidth” mode where it automatically lowers the resolution until it buffers without issue, Roon currently does not have this feature. Pandora and Spotify do not stream high-res so it wouldn’t have this issue and Qobuz is likely implementing the adaptive streaming model I mentioned.
The technical support rep went to to indicate that this functionality (adaptive bandwidth {control}) would be considered as a future feature. It looks like it is still a future feature…
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I also very occasionally experience this stopping and skipping phenomenon when streaming Tidal through Roon (Qobuz is not available here in Canada). Everything is connected via ethernet within the house and Roon works flawlessly almost all of the time, but our internet service comes over the cell phone network as we live rural. On average we get around 10Mbps which is fine for most things (even 2 concurrent Zoom meetings!), but occasionally this drops to 1Mbps or even less (often between 6pm-7pm) - Tidal streaming does not like this, and so this is when the stop/skip behaviour occurs.
BTW the skipping must be built into Roon - there is a feature request to change this in another thread.
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Here I also have around 10Mbps, and even with a damaged fibre link and considerably less bandwidth, I didn’t experience problems with Tidal. When the hiccup occurs, it is out of the blue and possibly after several hours of listening. As I don’t fully understand why these hiccups occur, I don’t know really how to remedy the problem. I usually restart the router and the Roon server process on my core device, and after this procedure things usually turn back to normal again. No big problem at all.
I also suffer these random dropouts and skipping to the next track most nights, the main difference is that I do not stream anything, my core in on a windows machine, music on a nas, endpoint is my dac with network bridge, everything is connected by cable, the only wifi is to my laptop that that I use to control Roon. As I don’t stream why do I suffer in the same way?
I wouldn’t know. But your experience is more evidence for the idea that this problem has nothing to do with the users’ networks. Or maybe it does, but not in the sense that there was something fundamentally wrong with the networks. I suspect that there are many more users who randomly experience this problem, but wouldn’t open support cases on the forum, either because they know by experience that the problem will go away in a few minutes, or because they feel uncomfortable on an Internet forum.
random: Random in what sense?
- Where in a track this occurs (at the start, somewhere, shortly before the end)?
- When it occurs (time of day)?
dropouts and skipping:
- Mostly dropouts, skipping occurs rarely?
- Mostly skipping, dropouts occur rarely?
- Always dropouts sometimes they go away and when not it skips track?
- How long is the dropout period before skipping then?
next track:
- When it skips it’s always only the current track or can it also be more?
most: Why?
- Because you don’t listen every night?
- Because there are nights without issues?
nights: Why?
- Because I don’t listen during the day.
- It never happens when I listen during the day only during the night.
- Is there a time frame (UTC) that you can provide?
It’s not the meaning that you answer all these questions here, it should just show that there is much that someone who suffers from such issues could and should take note of as an attempt to recognize repeating patterns. This is usually essential if one wants to have a chance to figure out what causes the issues.
PS: Some ISPs do reset customers internet connection every day (often during the night). Services provided from the router for internal clients (DHCP, DNS) might be unavailable during this time and may lead to issues even when not streaming from internet sources.
Mr. BlackJack,
I’m probably going to regret engaging you relative to your response to Mike Durham’s note, but so be it. My interpretation of Mike’s note was one of a well-intentioned user expressing concern about the operation of a relatively expensive software package that was not working like the user-friendly appliance that it should be. Your aggressive questions suggest that you would have clear insights into the problem if Mike only answered the specific questions that you posed. I’m pretty sure that you would not. You should spend less time playing Roon fanboy and more time genuinely committed to acknowledging and helping to address issues that other users report rather than resorting to thinly-veiled taunting of someone that you seem to judge as undisciplined in their reporting.
I have been involved in these music server issues since the early days of the SLIMP3 (the predecessor to the Squeezebox) and I can tell you that the reason that it became the much-admired (if commercially unsuccessful) product that it was was the commitment of a broad user community that was more interested in improving the product than chastising new users who were struggling.
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As I wrote:
This was just an attempt, using Mike’s description as an example, to show that it needs (much) more precise observation of an issue of that kind he describes to be able to find the root cause. I even tried and made a guess about what could be a possible cause for such a problem.
I’m sorry if you, Mike or anyone else got harmed through this attempt.
Because you have so much experience, feel free to answer his question then right away.
Late to the party… Yes, Roon appears to download full tracks from Qobuz (see screenshot below, from Cockpit on my NUC Ubuntu Server 20.04 core while “streaming” from Qobuz. My network is fully wired except for mobile devices/laptops, which coincidentally rely on an AmpliFi wireless network (bridged to an Ubiquiti EdgeRouter), Looking at the AmpliFi documentation, I wonder if you could segregate the core from the endpoints by setting the core to use 5GHz and the endpoints to use 2.4GHz, maybe needing to turn band steering off on the AmpliFi. I’m a bit surprised that the core track download burst blocks the RAAT streams to the endpoints on your network, but WiFi can be weird. In an ideal world, you’d have a wired connection from your AmpliFi router to the core, but I realize that may not be practical in your setting.
I can’t recall all the discussions about streaming services and Roon, but I totally understand why Roon would prefer to download the whole track as early as possible, so as to ensure it can control play with the least chance of stutters from internet congestion. IOW, it’s easier for Roon to ask their users to control congestion in their home networks, with wiring if necessary, than to try to control what happens with congestion on the wider internet. Just my $.02…
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Blackjack
Random means just that, it can happen at the beginning of a track, middle or end. Some days it doesn’t happen at all, it’s always in the evening as that’s the only time I sit down to listen to music, so that’s a constant.
I used to have the core on an Mac Mini and was suffering very badly so I purchased a new mini Dell running W10 and the problems have diminished by 80%.
I’m understand the principles of computing and networks but not to the depth of being able to engage in conversation about the ways and wherefores or the minutia of there working, and to be honest at my age nor do I care.
Why have I not raised a support ticket, simple, I see plenty of other reports of the same problems, yet I’ve never seen any answers! Plus I spent most of my working life trying to find faults that the other engineers couldn’t solve, so I appreciate the problems in trying to give answers to random issues. Occasionally you have to admit defeat and say, sorry I don’t know the answer in your case, but I will keep looking and you never know, perhaps one day a solution will be found.
In case you haven’t guessed I’m in the UK so does that add another variable into the equation?
I pays my money and I like things to work as advertised and If they don’t I complain, but sometimes the problem is’t that simple and it will get solved by changing something that’s totally unrelated and quietly go away.
I wonder how many thousands of people use Roon and never have a problem?
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Zero.
But if the question was how many people find it largely trouble-free, or meets their expectations it would be around 90,000.
My guess is there are another 5,000 who are having various issues that are worked through with Support. Most of them have their problem solved. Many of them absolutely swear it is the software and not their system because “they can stream Tidal fine” or “I am a network professional”. But the problem gets fixed most of the time.
The remaining 5% of users seem split evenly between those with serious issues that are not being addressed (I’m thinking the memory leaks or run-away CPU usage) and folks that are sort of head cases.
It’s a village.
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What that tells me is that download isn’t the problem. What are your buffer sizes in device/setup?
Its a matter of attitude. There are companies that have millions of users and a hundred have issues. They go at great lenghts identifying those issues and fixing them.
Roon is different. Their view: It works for 90.000 and only 5.000 have problems, so it cant be us, it must be a problem at the user‘s end. I have not come accross such attitude in a very long time.
May be they can (still) afford it.
Let’s not forget that Ethernet WiFi is half duplex while a wired Ethernet connection is full duplex. I am sure that is another reason Roon wants the Core to be on wired Ethernet.
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As far as I can tell, Roon has shown great interest in identifying and fixing playback problems with their software in the past. Thanks for that by the way. If users decide to not take their specific issue to Roon support or just cease troubleshooting short after beginning their will be no progress in finding an fixing errors in Roon (should they exists).
As others already pointed out, there are users that don’t have problems. So should the playback problems stem from Roon then they might show up only in very specific user environments or rare conditions. Both of them, environment and condition, can also be the source of the issue and needs fixing on user side then.
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