I am not really sure where to post this, so mods feel free to move.
The discussion so far has been in binary terms. The consequences of internet / no internet. But there are several threads starting to emerge where a stable internet can be assumed but nevertheless there is no longer snappy responsiveness, there are increased gaps in playback between tracks, there are skipped tracks in queues, or even no results being returned in search results at all.
In some cases a contributory factor may well be the underlying network/internet performance but many of these threads are being prefixed with “since build 1169 I am experiencing this or that degradation in performance . . .”
Is this the consequence of various functionalities already being moved from local servers to the cloud? Is this general architectural approach even feasible for legacy roon customers with large, heavily curated local libraries? Anyone else experiencing these sorts of issues?
I’ve had overlong gaps between tracks, just long enough to wonder if anything went wrong, grab my tablet and see Roon resume play or struggle to resume playing. This happened with FLACs in my local library, but it’s unclear whether the internet dependency was responsible.
Yes. It’s a grey area. But I think if you have not been experiencing these sorts of performance issues in prior releases then it doesn’t automatically follow that it is local network/internet issues. Roon have announced a major architectural change so I think it is at least as likely that is a contributory factor.
Roon 1.8 is still available for download. I regressed from 2.0 and can still play local files when there’s no internet. I don’t care about ARC and 1.8 still functions.
I just tried downgrading to 1.8 as I am having a lot of problems with 2.0. But all I get is that my database is now incompatible with 1.8. Has that window closed?
I believe it has. If you have an older backup of your database you should be able to restore, otherwise you’d need to start from scratch with a new DB.
I noticed a significant decrease in snappiness over the last month or so, where it was taking an average of twenty seconds to switch between tracks. Any time I chose to go to a different track—regardless of local, streaming, or format—it would have significant lag. ARC at work was better than my home setup.
I recently shut down the Nucleus for an afternoon in order to install a piece of gear down the chain, and after I booted it back up, it was better but is starting to lag again. Not as bad as it was over the past month though. I am not sure if it is related, but I wanted to chime in.
I noticed it again during local album playback yesterday. It doesn’t happen between every track, but every few tracks, the gapless playback is gone. Just long enough to prompt me to check whether anything went wrong, pretty annoying.
Same here. The gapless dropout is sporadic, but frequent enough to make me question if it’s a setup/network issue on my end.
I also periodically get a very long load time for a new track. Usually a new track starts within 1-2 seconds. Roughly once a day (or every other day) I get a 30sec to 1 minute load time. Then back to normal load times.
If not already done, try changing your DNS to Cloudfare (1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1) or even google (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) this has been known to resolve similar problems.
Cloudfare servers are generally the fastest & most reliable which may be the reason for their popularity in resolving erratic performance on playback.
Transient latency on your home network is a real true pain to diagnose, and can have a gazillion causes. For me that has been the issue both of the times that I’ve started to experience gaps, and the one time I started experiencing dropouts. Roon is really demanding. None of that means there isn’t something external - given wide enough nature of this experience I’m sure it’s a very reasonable possibility. But yes, I can also see there being a non-trivial portion of users who have some latency issues popping up simultaneously. Truly wish Roon had passive “eyes on” internal network performance of all users. Many would not want that for privacy reasons. But this kind of thing is awful to diagnose. Fwiw, I’m not experiencing this now, I was near apoplectic the two times I experienced it, and eventually found issues that were of my own (unintentional, unknowing) creation. So I’m inclined to go digging in my own back yard more than the average person perhaps.
