Tidal is too slow very often - why we have no buffering?

In truth 50Mbs up and down is a pretty good and useful speed, especially for a small household . In truth I don’t need 1Gb/120Mb, but when I backup my music and Synology to the the cloud I am always thankful that I have it.

I met some guys going door to door the other day having seen new fiber going into the street. They are offering 8Gb up and down for about £100 a month which is nuts.
I don’t need it and I haven’t long bought a WiFi Mesh that can handle 1Gb and it doesn’t have 2.5Gb or 10Gb ports, so maybe next upgrade :face_with_peeking_eye:

I remember putting the first fixed line 256Mb on a 2Mb circuit on our industrial estate back in about 1998 or 1999, cost about £1,500 a month and was shared between about 50 people. Within a year we had taken all the increments up to 2Mb and then ordered a 1Gb (we could afford 5Mb or 10Mb to start) line which cost about £40,000 just to run the fiber. Fun day’s they were.

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Forgive me if this is wrong. In Roon, go to “Library”. Go down to “Background audio analysis speed”. I run all four cores. I almost never have a hiccup since doing this. I run Tidal. Using a Nucleus+. Hope this helps. Take care. Vic

I have that set exactly the same, and it’s great for analysing large additions to the library (for me). But doesn’t help when there’s slowdown in cloud infrastructure it’s whatever is causing this issue.
Given that Roon almost never respond to this issue, it’s hard to understand what is going on.

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Apparently information is power.
Enough said :roll_eyes:

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Try adding buffering delay in your device setup. Audio/device/advanced. There are two setting that add buffering. Resync delay and group sync delay. Both in milliseconds i.e 1000ms = 1 sec. I would try less than 500ms resync delay to start

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The first option is there to allow the DAC time to switch from one sample rate to another, and should only be used if you have issues. Likewise, group syncing only applies when there are issues using multiple zones.

Neither affects the buffering of streaming services.

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The problem as I see it is between Roon and tidal not in our settings. My streamer does Roon and tidal connect and lo and behold tidal connect works flawlessly when Roon falls over.

Here’s hoping tidal data does not have to go through Roon’s servers that would be dumb

I think you are right. Every time I have this issue through Roon, Tidal and Qobuz continue to work flawlessly, both directly and through the BluOS app. Very frustrating.

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TIDAL Connect: Internet → Router → Streamer
Roon: Internet → Router → Roon server → Router/ switch → Streamer

In other words, not a like for like comparison. Such issues are likely local network capacity exposed by the stream traversing the network twice. But, this is not the issue described by the OP and others.

Sorry to spoil this, but moderator privileges … I corrected the typo. :laughing:

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No not at all. My network is Unifi throughout and hardwired for all hifi journeys I do not believe for a minute it’s a bottle neck on my network. I can download games etc on steam at 1gig constant until complete.

The problem arises on a Friday or Saturday night, I assume some peek times for Roon/tidal in the uk.

The good news is my streamer does tidal connect directly so I can circumvent this issue.

These points seem to contradict each other, since Roon takes the stream URI from TIDAL.

But I am fortunate as I haven’t experienced this. However, I don’t add streaming sources to my Roon library, and only use TIDAL (currently) for music discovery and Listen Later.

I’m using fully wired Gigabit Ethernet on good old CAT5e with a 500 Mbps symmetrical fibre WAN.

I don’t see any contradiction, tidal via roon = slow on a friday night, tidal direct on same streamer = absolutely fine on a friday night.

I have roon running on a dedicated PC i5 10th gen, 16 gigs ram. Its plenty powerful enough to knock over audio, the problem is not constant just at what I would guess are peek times with roon. I also note the roon forum at these problematic times is dead slow as well. But that might be coincidence I guess.

JRiver offer both track and album memory playback and have or years

I seem to remember some talk about TIDAL having their own dedicated Roon server’s for streaming, but I could be mistaken remembering this. Many of us share your thoughts that this is an over capacity issue.

Maybe @anon15113244 can get Danny to run another two Pi’s in his mother’s basement, that should help especially if the original two can be upgraded from 3B’s to 5’s with 16GB or memory :roll_eyes:

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I think there are two problems here: one is Tidal streams being slow (and there are many possible reasons for this, as discussed above).

But the other is what Roon does when the bits are not streaming in as expected. My experience is that it is extremely fast in skipping to the next track and I don’t like it. If there is a network problem, ok. The music stops and everyone is annoyed. But I’m not sure roon is doing anyone a favour when it immediately skips to the next track.

One indicator that roon skips prematurely is that the next Tidal track usually plays without delay, which means that the connection with Tidal servers can’t have been so bad that “giving up” would have been warranted.

I would hope that Roon gives Tidal (or the network, or whatever is causing the delay) a bit more time to recover. The art in handling such hicups would be in waiting long enough to make sure that the stream really recoverd (so that the music won’t stop playing again after half a second), but not too long to make the pause people wonder whether there is another problem.

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