After pressing play in Roon for a Tidal album or song, I experience a delay of 5-15 seconds before the music starts. Sometimes after the delay the track plays for about 5 seconds then pauses for 3 seconds and resumes playing. Other times it has a delayed start, then stops after 5 seconds and skips to the next track, with Roon showing the message in orange letters: “Tidal is loading slowly. This might indicate a networking or…”
This behavior happens with different Roon endpoints: SOtM SMS-200 and Windows PC with Roon. It also happens when I play Tidal directly with Sonos. I have not tried Sonos as Roon endpoint because Roon stopped seeing my Sonos as endpoint, but we’ll save that for another topic.
During the delay, a light blue tone can be seen moving back and forth in the sliding time bar for the track.
The blue star icon for the Signal Path dialog box in Roon Core does not appear until music starts playing on regular FLAC tracks. But when playing Tidal Masters, the blue star is delayed like on non-masters tracks, but then it does appear during the delay, allowing me to open the Signal Path dialog to see that the ‘Authentication’ field is blank, then after another 5 seconds it populates with MQA 96khz, and music finally starts playing. MQA tracks have an even longer delay than regular Tidal HiFi 44.1kHz tracks. The extra 5 seconds is tacked on for MQA authetication.
FF or REW using the time slide bar causes the same delay before it starts playing again. Pressing the forward track or back track buttons also causes delay, pause, skipping.
It is random as to what I will get, a delay, a pause or a skip. But one of those three things happens on every Tidal track I try to play.
Playing music files from the NAS on my LAN with Roon has instant response, and no problems with FF/REW, pausing or skipping.
Streaming Tidal directly using the Windows Tidal app from a PC on my LAN has a consistent 1 second delay from hitting play to starting the music, and no pauses or skips, even with Masters tracks.
I have verified that my network is healthy. Streaming 4k video, playing video games, etc. no problems. Network is ATT 60Mb fiber to ATT router bridged to eero. eero DHCP. Roon Core, SMS200 and eero are all wired ethernet. eero is set to use Google DNS servers. Roon Core runs on Dell Windows 8 PC with 8GB ram. Roon and OS are up to date.
I just renewed my Roon subscription. I have been using Roon for about 16 months. This all started in the last couple months. Seems like it’s getting worse the last few days. The pausing and skipping are new this weekend, but the delay has been going for <2 months.
Thanks for the help!
Rich