Tidal Issues - Frequent Message "There was a network error in accessing this album. Please check your Internet."

@support
This is becoming more and more frequent, but let me provide the details without getting caught up on the numerous reasons I’m beginning to regret using Roon

Setup:
PS Audio DSD DAC with Bridge, connected to Asus router via Ethernet. Router is connected directly to high speed cable modem. There are no special configs and the issue occurs when my Dell Inspiron laptop (Windows 10 of course) from which I operate Roon is connected via Ethernet itself or on either of the WiFi networks (standard or 5g). 200KBPS+ (currently 217.49 wireless) downstream Internet, verify every time the issue is encountered using Ookla. There are no concurrent downloads or uploads (or streaming) anywhere on my network, and I have verified this with Wireshark and of course by monitoring the devices connected to my intranet. Standard Windows firewall, have no problems with ANY other service, including Tidal when used on its own.

For the past several months, on an intermittent basis, I will open up Roon and attempt to play a song. Now, the songs that cause problems are as follows. For example, if I have saved one track, Jump, off of Van Halen’s “1984” on Tidal to my Roon tracks library, I will often want to listen to Panama or Top Jimmy (two different tracks on the same album), well in Roon the standard functionality is that ONLY the song you have saved to your library shows up when you search for a given album that contains that song. If you want to listen to a song not on your playlist, normally a little box/icon appears at the bottom-center of the Roon Windows desktop application where it says “Show entire Tidal album” (or something like that - I can’t see it now due too the issue I’m reporting, so that’s a paraphrase).

Issue #1 - as has been the case several times in the past few months, that option/box/link doesn’t even show up. So I’ll often I’ll restart Roon as I did just now, and then it will appear. But when I click on it, I get the Internet error message in the subject line. There is nothing wrong with my Internet. Furthermore, I launch Tidal to see if there is any issue, and there is NOT. Tidal immediately accesses the entire album. Roon offers no troubleshooting or network test functionality (Roon’s network, not mine or Tidal’s) but given the elimination of other variables, the problem is obviously something to do with Roon.

I cannot find an “about” button or link inside the Roon interface, but I am on the lastest version, having remembered that I was prompted to update a few weeks ago. The PS Audio DAC is on the Redcloud version of its firmware (there is an update, but irrelevant to this issue).

That is my first issue that I would like solved or at least I would like an honest answer on whether its known about.

Secondly, Issue #2 - the search feature in Roon (again searching Tidal) is sometimes comically bad. It doesn’t turn up OBVIOUS results which I then have to go to Tidal again just to make sure it’s actually there. In every case where Roon did not return the correct (or any) result, of course it’s right there in the top 5-10 results returned via my Tidal direct search.

Let me add that with Issue #2 it has ALWAYS been the case with Roon, however worse lately. I have been a user for about 7 months now I think. But from day one I have had friends come over and I’ll tell them all about how great Roon is and encourage them to find a song they want to hear on my system - forget it…the song or album they search almost NEVER shows up. We then check Tidal and there it is.

If I have missed any critical piece off configuration/system information, please let me know, but I am 100% confident, given a background in tech, tech support,networking and audio systems that the problem lies with Roon, either your servers’ interface with Tidal, or your overall connection to your ISP (incl. routing issues and latencies). But this is making your software unusable especially for the price.

Is there a quick and easy way to determine whether Roon or its ISP is having a problem at any time? For example a URL that we can plug into “down for everyone or just me” to see if one Roon server or another happens to be down? https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/roon.com

Any help appreciated.

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34 posts were split to a new topic: Frequent TIDAL Error Messages

A post was split to a new topic: TIDAL errors in the evening

A post was split to a new topic: TIDAL Network Errors

A post was split to a new topic: Network Errors With TIDAL

I do want to be clear, EVERY time I’ve experienced the issue above (haven’t used Roon much since that Saturday) I’ve cross checked with Tidal app on two separate wireless networks and on my phone and am unable to duplicate the problem. It was indeed centered on Roon. If it happens again they have asked me to re-post in this thread and tag support.

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@support

Here we go again. Same issue today except also Tidal Discover and Rising (and other similar stuff) takes forever to load, or I have to restart to get them to load at all.

Search also not working or lagging extremely. Restarting Roon seems to fix the issue but after a few songs it starts again.

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Issue still here today. For example trying to Play Jessie Ware’s “Glass Houses” continually takes forever to load, can’t play a single entire song without it stopping.

Now says “This song not available from Tidal” and refuses to play MOST music. Opened Tidal and it works just fine.

Further, when I pick an artist’s album for whom I have used Roon to add a track to my library, the button at the bottom to allow me to see the rest of the songs on that album doesn’t appear.

This is getting very old.

Ookla speed test results: over 200MBPS down. @support

Hello @casey_cook,

Sorry to hear that the issue has surfaced again. I have gone ahead and enabled diagnostics mode for your account and what this action will do is next time your Core is active, a set of logs will automatically be generated and uploaded to our servers for analysis. I will take a look around the playback attempt you mentioned of Jessie Ware’s “Glass Houses” and check to see if there are any errors on the Roon side of things once the report comes in.

– Noris

Hello @casey_cook,

I took a look at the diagnostics from your core around the Jessie Ware’s playback attempt and this is what I saw:

04/01 17:13:16 Trace: [streamingmediafile] immediate read of http://ab-pr-cf.audio.tidal.com/130f91dfc49529c16bbcb21fef940937_39.flac at 2490368 length=46317561
04/01 17:13:16 Warn: [Living Room] [zoneplayer/raat] long rtt sync PS Audio DirectStream DAC: realtime=7010937848385 rtt=286500us offset=-2133438151us delta=21613us drift=137786us in 12.037s (11446.926ppm, 41208.935ms/hr)
04/01 17:13:17 Info: [stats] 5894mb Virtual, 755mb Physical, 182mb Managed, 1684 Handles, 78 Threads
04/01 17:13:18 Trace: [streamingmediafile] immediate read of http://ab-pr-cf.audio.tidal.com/130f91dfc49529c16bbcb21fef940937_39.flac at 2752512 length=46317561
04/01 17:13:18 Warn: [Living Room] [zoneplayer/raat] long rtt sync PS Audio DirectStream DAC: realtime=7012971280909 rtt=319500us offset=-2133463719us delta=-25567us drift=112219us in 14.0615s (7980.598ppm, 28730.152ms/hr)
04/01 17:13:19 Trace: [Living Room] [Enhanced, 24/44 MQA TIDAL FLAC => 24/44 MQA] [50% buf] [PLAYING @ 0:04/3:47] Your Domino - Jessie Ware
04/01 17:13:20 Warn: [Living Room] [zoneplayer/raat] long rtt sync PS Audio DirectStream DAC: realtime=7015000677584 rtt=310500us offset=-2133464322us delta=-603us drift=111615us in 16.0985s (6933.308ppm, 24959.907ms/hr)
04/01 17:13:20 Trace: [streamingmediafile] immediate read of http://ab-pr-cf.audio.tidal.com/130f91dfc49529c16bbcb21fef940937_39.flac at 3145728 length=46317561
04/01 17:13:21 Trace: [PS Audio DirectStream DAC @ 192.168.50.129:34809] [raatclient] GOT [6994] {"samples":2420,"status":"Dropout"}
04/01 17:13:21 Trace: [PS Audio DirectStream DAC @ 192.168.50.129:34809] [raatclient] GOT [6994] {"samples":612,"status":"Dropout"}

To sum the above for you, the diagnostics are saying that your network is failing to buffer the tracks properly. I believe there could be a few possible sources for this issue:

  1. Your network connection is going down or is unstable

  2. There is something preventing the proper buffering for your PS Audio Zone

  3. There is a setting in your router that might prevent Roon from working properly

Here is how I would address each of my above points:

  1. When you are having difficulties buffering, can you please run a speedtest using speedtest.net or fast.com and let me know what it reports?

  2. Let’s try to separate weather this is a zone-specific issue of if it affects all zones. Can you try using another endpoint other than the PS Audio zone and see if that performs as expected?

  3. In our Networking Best Practices guide, we list Asus routers as needing to have the “Enable Multicast Routing” option enabled in settings. Can you please check to see that this is enabled?

Thanks,
Noris

Let me address each item:

  1. The only thing I can think of is that I’m downloading content including TV streams, but usually just one TV, in fact most of the time none. Only intermittent file downloads. I do happen to check every time and it’s almost always upwards of 150Mbps, the lowest I’ve ever encountered, and again this is Internet speeds, is about 4-5Mbps, again almost always with nothing concurrent.

  2. I am only using one zone, unfortunately, as I don’t use the roon core for anything else. What are some options there?

  3. I did indeed check and “Enable Multicast Routing” was NOT checked so I turned it on.

What specifically is it about “multicast routing” that might affect Roon?

Also, I failed to mention that the SD card only works for updating firmware in my PS Audio - otherwise the Album picture functionality has never worked. I’m using a 32GB Class 10 SanDisk Ultra SD card, and very little if anything at all is stored on it, but yet the album pictures NEVER work with Roon. I have reset the SD card, re-formatted, made sure it re-seat it and nothing works. It has worked in the past, but so long ago I can barely remember. This SD card functions perfectly in my PC and I have the 2nd most recent build (SnowMass) of PS Audio’s firmware installed on the DAC.

Thanks and let me know if this helps. Also please let me know if you think the issue with the album covers is related.

I also forgot to mention that in EVERY single case, Tidal works just fine.

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@support - By the way…it’s also become apparent that Roon CANNOT play well with ANY concurrent network traffic. It’s ridiculous. I won’t be renewing. Literally EVERY SINGLE TIME, Tidal works fine.

So what if I’ve got a 5Mbps download going while my Ookla results (on wireless) say 50Mbps download/20Mbps upload? Your software simply has some problems and I cannot countenance paying $500 or whatever for a lifetime subscription if it’s THIS easily breakable in 2019 Internet terms.

So sad. I HIGHLY encourage you and give you permissions to pull any logs you need starting now and going back three hours from 730PM Central time on April 5, 2019. It’s ridiculous. Need I repeat - Tidal has worked FINE every time I’ve tried.

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Hey Casey,

I understand your frustration here, but I want to be clear that thousands of people are using Roon + TIDAL every day, and obviously, they have all sorts of network traffic going on.

Something about your setup, network, or environment is different here, and our team will work with you and do everything they can to identify what that is. But I want to be clear that what you’re describing here isn’t the normal behavior.

If I was having these issues, the first thing I would do would to try running the Core on a different machine, since this system seems to be having some generalized stability issues. If it’s possible, running your Core elsewhere will help you determine a) whether these issues are localized to the current Core machine, and b) whether Roon is related to the issues that machine is experiencing.

In any event, our team is at your disposal, and Noris will be in touch with next steps to make sure we figure out what’s going on here. Thanks again for your patience.

Hi @casey_cook,

I just wanted to follow up with you here and see if you have had a chance to look into any possible hardware related issues as I mentioned in the other active thread you have with us (Roon causing total system freeze/non-response in Windows 10?). It would be a good step for us to figure out the hardware side first and then take a closer look at this issue after any possible hardware issues are resolved.

In my last message, I also indicated that we should try to separate weather this issue occurs across all zones or just the PS Audio zone. You mentioned that you don’t have other zones, but can you try outputting via the “System Output” zone on your Core and let me know if that is stable?

Thanks,
Noris

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