Michael,
I run a LinkSys WiFi 6 network using 3 MX5s. My Roon Nucleus Plus is wired to the router node. The music library is a 4TB SSD in the Nucleus.
This set up hasn’t skipped a beat and routinely compete with a couple of video cons set to highest res. among other large house digital detritus. As others have stated, I think it’s all in hard-wiring to your router node.
I’ve had the same message “…loading slowly” even though I first had Core Server installed on a NAS attached connected to the router by ethernet. So, I changed to an external SSD vice the slower NAS hard drive. Same thing. Then I bought a music server, better than I needed, with SSD attached, and installed Core Server on that instead of the NAS. Attached to the router with ethernet. Same issue. Then I upgraded my Fios router to the latest Fios a wifi 6 router. Same thing, lol. Yikes!
The only thing I have wifi are my wifi Elac Z3 speakers that were there all along. Was told that the problem really was on that end, getting it to them. Think even Elac said they needed a really good connection.
I don’t think I have had the problem anymore once I put in a zen wifi mesh in the house.
I had the same experience which was addressed by putting an upload/download limit on the roon wireless client. I was able to do this as I use a Ubiqiti network at home.
This has resulted in a throttling the bandwidth but no deterioration of the streamed music.
Without the throttle, the roon core would pull from upstream (Tidal in my case) at the highest download speed as possible, and the roon client (wireless) would I think congest wifi (which is 2.4Ghz on my roon endpoint).
A bit of a kludge, but it seems to have sorted the issue for me.
Well, I just defined upload/download rules for my Roon core server; will see how it goes… Thanks for reporting your experience!
thanks for the hint. But all this should not be necessary if Roon would act like a well behaving network citizen and not like a hooligan.
Found that ROON was maxing my Internet bandwidth - still is right now.
As a result trying to stream Radio Paradise even at 128k was constantly stopping - not pausing & restarting but stopping.
Quit all other open apps - same issue - plus I can see the network stats against Roon incrementing on Activity monitor - 792M downloaded so far.
I started VLC and was / am able to stream 128k RP and cast it with no interruptions at all.
Whatever the ‘keep up to date reasons’ there’s something wrong with Roons internal traffic priorities, if I can get stable streaming with VLC which costs me exactly £0 and Roon fails.
Clearly playing music is a more important task for Roon than updating a database - or maybe i’m missing something.
Can I ask how you’re doing this? I’m at my wits end and I’d like to resolve this.
I had defined traffic control rules on my router. I have since removed these rules, as I have very little WiFi traffic where my Roon system is located, and at the same time I wish Roon Core to use as much Internet bandwidth as is available for downloading and pre-caching streaming tracks.
Sounds really great and maybe a little expensive?
Everyones internet is different tho - mostly due to where I’m located I get approx 6M down & 0.5M up via ADSL. Thats as good as it gets unless I switch supplier, which I can’t do for ‘reasons’. Its definitely sufficient to stream 128k RP with zero problems.
Suspect that’s a little peripheral tho, in the sense that for as long as Roon is doing whatever update it’s doing, it seems unable to prioritise my streaming use of the app, over its internal update download process. Of course a faster download would shorten the time to update & a slower download the reverse.
The fact that I can switch to another app on the same machine and stream with zero problems, whilst Roon continues to do its update & use all available Internet bandwidth thing, confirms to me that either MacOS (or maybe my router) is able to allocate Roon update traffic & VLC streaming traffic in a more equitable way than Roon itself is, when I try to have it do both.
Is there anything more important for Roon to do, than play music when I ask it to?
(Looks like the Roon download finished at just under 2Gbytes - not sure if that’s all of it or just the total from when I started activity monitor.)
This should be ok. If you stream from Tidal/Qobuz, the important thing is that Roon may have enough download bandwidth to be able to download and cache faster on the core than the file is consumed (played to an endpoint). For 16/44.1 files, this is about 1.6 mbps.
My observation is that other tasks as image and metadata updates will work out ok with a couple of mbps. On my system it rarely goes above 5 mbps.
Np - likely the way I worded my OP and the context of the rest of the topic. Maybe I should’ve started a new one.
I think the way most apps work is that they download files as fast as they’re able to. Within reason of course - if you had a 10G Internet pipe then the bound might be elsewhere - processor, storage speed etc.
So for example if my internet doubled to 12M down then I’m assuming the Roon update would take half the time and so I’d experience the problem for half the time.
Afaik there’s no Roon spec that says a minimum Internet bandwidth is needed.
As I say this feels like it’s about prioritisation within the Roon app - seems reasonable that playing music should always be top, when it comes to resource allocation.
Though maybe there’s more to it - reading Andreas’ posts above.
I guess I’m lucky living in a single storey bungalow, very easy to make everything Ethernet connected, I also have a two disc mesh wi-if network but both discs are Ethernet connected. The only wi-fi hop is to the disc then the back haul to the router is Ethernet. Gives me zero issues using multiple devises.
I wonder how many users actually read the Networking Best Practices section of the Knowledge Base? It would save an awful lot of time and trouble if more of them did…
I know that I did and it didn’t help.
Thanks. Did you do this by port, or something, so that only Roon would be throttled? And how did you differentiate metadata download from Tidal/Qobuz?
On my router I can define rules for guaranteed and maximum upload/download traffic per MAC address. This of course doesn’t differentiate metadata traffic from streaming traffic.
But as Roon is the only app on my network with critical download requirements from Internet, this really was not necessary nor desirable to do. When downloading and caching the next track from my queue, Roon indeed uses as much bandwidth as possible - for a few seconds. I don’t do online gaming nor stream video/TV, so this doesn’t bother me at all.
I can see that eventually this could be of good service, when total available bandwidth is very limited, and there are several active apps or devices on the network with critical minimum download bandwidth needs. Then such rules may be beneficial, assigning to each service a max and/or assign a guaranteed minimum.
Since last year my database has grown considerably to near 200.000 tracks, and nowadays image or metadata updates may take much longer, but don’t use more bandwidth than before. These tasks seem to be executed sequentially, and bandwidth use is normally about 2-4 mbps for as long as it takes.