Anyone else annoyed by the fact that Roon Server just stops playing music when it detects new music and starts adding it to the library?
I know you can disable the automatic detection, but then you have to remember to go tell it to scan your music location each time you add new music. I don’t understand why the software can’t either add the music while still playing the music (row level transaction locking in the DB not present?) or at least detect that music is playing and delay updating until it won’t interrupt playing music.
How much music are you adding and how are you adding it when this occurs?
I’ve added music while listening and haven’t noticed any interruption. But I’m talking about 5 to 10 DSD 256 5.1 albums using copy paste from Windows explorer. Not a large amount of new music at once. Just curious.
Generally, I buy around 10 - 20 albums off BandCamp, then save them to my Roon Server (running on ROCK on Intel NUC w/ Core i7 32GB RAM, 8TB NVMe). This results in somewhere between 200 and 800 tracks.
It appears to stop the music while it is looking up the metadata from Roon. I do have “prefer Roon” selected for most of my tags during import. I’ve also only got analysis restricted to 4 cores (out of 8), so there should be plenty of power left for playing music. However, it doesn’t stop playing or have any dropouts during analysis, it’s just the import. The little wheel spins in the top right corner and if you click on it, it says “adding X albums, identified X”. As soon as that process completes, then music starts playing right where it left off.
It definitely feels like it is a database locking issue. Like it is blocking the player from reading the database because so many new rows are being written to it. If the database can only lock on tables, that could be the issue. I’ve got 21,000 albums and 170,000 tracks. Searches take a while to load as well.
Your experience isn’t the norm. Importing many hundreds of albums is best done with playback paused, but what you’re doing isn’t an issue. I do this all the time.
No, since Roon doesn’t use an SQL database, and streaming isn’t dependent on metadata anyway.
I suggest you open a Support thread to diagnose the problem.
To be clear, are you are copying them over the network using the PC’s file manager to the Roon Server’s share OR, are you are dragging and dropping the new albums onto the Roon program?
I have automated scripts that save directly to the Roon Server library folder, which is shared using SMB (I’m assuming Samba).
It also doesn’t look like it is stopping playback, but actually stopping the starting of the next track in the playlist. After a few minutes of not playing, then the next track suddenly starts playing, then it ends… silence for several minutes, then suddenly the next track will play… repeat.
Roon definitely has a database although it looks like it mostly uses a lot of flat files for storage. There is some larger binary files called broker_4.db and orbit_v3.db. You can see it in the RoonServer\Database\ directory.
It seems like Roon is stopping whenever it needs to read the next song off the playlist. Eventually the request goes through, it plays the track, then it stops until it can read the next track.
I’m not sure it is worth opening a support request because my workaround is to schedule my additions of music to the RoonCore share when I’m sleeping. I just forgot about this weirdness and added some music today that I wanted to hear right away and got bitten by it. That’s why I was curious if others have had similar experience. Seems like maybe there is something unique about my setup if others aren’t having this issue.
What else is happening on the NUC , are you using DSP, upsampling etc that will “rob” the processor. If any then stop them.
Maybe set the Analysis Speed to throttled
21k albums /170k is a lot of tracks even for an i7, try restarting the Roon Server from the web admin page just before you start importing. For weather reasons I restart daily in the summer and see none of this behaviour. Worth a try.
Indirectly, yes. Roon’s database doesn’t use tables, rows etc.
There’s no weirdness, other than your setup isn’t working as intended.
1 Like
EinTo.Shuffle
(// Evolving "MixTape" on Shuffle with Roon //)
15
Same experience here.
When adding a single track to the library from Tidal/Qobuz Roon becomes very busy and the wheel upper right starts to spinn and suddenly finds quite a few other tracks that also needs to be handled. Playing music becomes laggy/paused for some seconds up to minutes when shifting tracks. This spinning can go on for an hour or two. Though it is not consistent and sometimes i can add wo Roon becoming busy.
I guess that the Roon developers are working on these issues / performance improvements in general. In the meantime it would be good to have the option to shift Roon background gardening stuff to nightime.
To mitigate this i have prepared a Playlist as a parking-lot for stuff to be added to library. I normally trigger this before i go to bed at night.
This behaviour has occured gradually here the last month(s).
I have the setting for adding to library set to “Throttle”.
I now restart Roon every 2-3 day since it seems that this makes it more responsive (for a while) .
Your reply indicates you might require assistance from Roon technical support. The behavour you describe is atypical.
To equip the Roon Technical Support team to assist you directly, please follow this link to provide the details of your case to Technical Support: Technical Support Request
Respond to the prompts there to ensure that you’ve performed basic troubleshooting and to ensure Technical Support has the full details necessary to expedite Technical Support’s investigation into the case. Your responses will auto-generate a Community thread in the appropriate section.
No, but about locks, and locks are typical for RDBMS, which coincidentally typically use SQL.
NoSQL databases typically have a more relaxed approach and/or use other methods, and Roon uses LevelDB which consequently doesn‘t have record or table locks.
This sounds related to the issues lots of us have reported where Roon is consuming al resources of its single core process for metadata retrieval to over 100% leaving no resource for other things expect analysis as that runs on different cores. This exact same thing manifests when it does metadata updates for a lot of us and it’s stopped playback numerous times for me. But this has never happened adding music just at other times but this feels like it’s related. If you also have background analysis on perhaps put it off and see if it still has issues as this if set high will use all remaining cores.
As I don’t use Rock I can see exactly what Roon is upto and I can see it max out its single core prices and can become stuck. Roon are investigating this behaviour as it’s being reported more than it should across different user and operating systems. I would put in a ticket.
I do it all the time and most of the time there is no issue, but occasionally it runs away with a single processor thread that runs for ages.
Exactly as @CrystalGipsy mentioned above. Even with an 8 core machine and background audio processing set to only allowing 1 or 2 threads.
It needs some work from Development