I apologise to all members of this community who must be sick and tired of posts about this subject, my problem, however, is slightly different to any previous posts about this. I’m was also not prepared to read through the hundreds of posts to attempt to find one with my problem.
I have an ASUS RT-AX88U Pro router and a fibre connection of 500Mbps. The Tidal loading slowly has been happening for years over WiFi despite numerous reset of the router and various configuration changes and DNS changes. There have been dozens.
I have 14 devices connected and as mentioned previously streaming 4K UHD over WiFi or Ethernet works perfectly. No other application has any problems. The one and only problem is Roon. Running native Tidal works perfectly.
Anyway the most common suggestion is to connect the core (MacBook Pro M1 Max) to the router with an Ethernet cable. So I did so. For several months all was fine but since the recent Roon update the “Tidal loading slowly…” is now happening over both WiFi and Ethernet.
This effectively precludes me from using Roon output to my NAD M33 DAC/Amp as the songs stuttering then moving to the next track repeatedly renders the service useless.
So I have had no choice but to stream to my M33 using Airplay2 which works perfectly over both WiFi and Ethernet. But now I lose the hi res capability as Airplay2 only supports hi res up to 48KHz whereas numerous hi res Tidal files can be 192KHz.
Does anyone else suffer from the Tidal Loading Slowly over Ethernet now - so it has progressed from WiFi?
Are you sure that is is Tidal related? I have currently similar issues but also with titles residing in my local storage.
can you also check if the problem persists with different clients. E.g I had titles skipping on my macbook but could play them on my iPad without problems. For me it looks like a problem I have with roon client running on my mac.
Thanks for the advice but this issue has been discussed as nauseam and I’ve tried very thing suggested over the past 5 years.
The answer is always that there’s something wrong on my end with my connectivity - router is configured incorrectly,!WiFi interference etc etc. I’ve spent many hours trying out all the suggestions. Nothing has ever worked.
As absolutely everything else works perfectly on come to my own conclusion that Roon itself is the problem but this is vehemently denied.
So contacting support will be a waste of my time and the time of the support staff.
I mainly wanted to know if other people are also experiencing this tidal loading slowly over Ethernet as I have not had this particular problem
I completely understand your frustration—I’ve been in the same boat. Roon consistently points to hardware as the issue behind slowdowns, but I’ve tested it on five different core machines across three homes, each with completely distinct network setups, including one professional-grade network. Yet the slowdowns persist, and the response is always the same: it’s the hardware. It feels like they just aren’t addressing the real problem.
Reaching out to support doesn’t seem to help either, as they keep circling back to blaming the hardware or configuration. Meanwhile, everything else works flawlessly—Spotify, Tidal, Netflix, HBO, all run smoothly without any hiccups. But Roon slows down to unacceptable levels far too often. It’s really disappointing.
Many thanks for this response. I’m so glad that there is someone else who has the same problem - to clarify I’m not glad that you have problems but because it reflects my frustrations precisely. I think what concerns me is that I purchased a lifetime subscription for a fairly expensive fee but have found it increasingly frustrating.
One of the stock answers that I’ve seen on numerous occasions is that Roon needs to be hardwired (Ethernet) as it was never intended to work wirelessly over WiFi. I find this hard to believe - it’s 2024 and the entire world is moving to wireless except, it seems, Roon. But the final straw was when it started doing this over Ethernet this past week.
Unfortunately I may have to write off the lifetime subscription as a loss and move to the Tidal front end or even Apple (the latter as it can also have playlists which contain local music files and streaming). It’s just reached a stage after many years of wasted hours fixing problems that don’t exist (as you say absolutely everything works perfectly) that it may be time to cut my losses and move on.
My network is hardwired as well because of Roon. The endponts do not work stable over wifi while every other music player just works flawleslly. It has been 8 years now but Roon still feels like beta software to me. As of yesterday I was searching for an album of a band I did not know the exact name off, after trying to find it in Roon for almost 10 minutes I tried Spotify search and found it within 10 seconds !. Roon can only find things if you know exactly how to spell it correctly, Spotify doesn’t mind, it just finds it lightning fast. That’s the difference we are facing, it is not even funny. Roon is great software in potential but the slowness is a real letdown to me. Albums load very slow, music playback sometomes takes 10-20 seconds to start with either the “tidal is loading slowly” or "playback stopped becuase of a corrupted file (that are not corrupted in any ohter players) or it is just very slow without any reason but slow it is about 30% of the time and that is unacceptable to me. Even if it is “fast” it is still ten times slower than Spotify.
I use Tidal as I have a relatively high end audio system so want the highest resolution music I can get. Correct me if I’m wrong but the highest resolution Spotify streams is 360Kbps whilst Tidal is 1,411Kbps for normal CD quality FLAC files. The difference is easily audible - in fact to such an extent that it’s audible to any individual whether they enjoy music or not. So I will stick with Tidal and use their front end in future. I just regret paying for a lifestyle Room licence that has ended up being a waste of money - but hey, such is life. You win some you lose some
Apologies for adding to this but I must emphasize that the problem has persisted through different addresses (all in South Africa) but Cape Town will be the last. It also includes 3 different ISPs and 4 different routers. The latest an Asus RT- AC88U Pro is supposedly a decent router for a 130 square metre house with only 2 people (me and my wife). We typically have 14 devices connected using Ethernet or WiFi and this can grow when my son and wife visit etc.
The main takeaway is that the Roon dropping with then”Tidal media loading slowly” message and skipping to the next track and doing this repeatedly has persisted for years through all these different internet access providers, locations and hardware.
It’s not about the server, but you would expect endpoints to run smoothly over Wi-Fi. That’s where the issue lies—Roon and Wi-Fi just don’t seem to get along. It might work perfectly for days, but then you’ll have a string of days where stability issues pop up. And yet, the blame always falls on the hardware. After 8 years, it feels like Roon’s design choices just aren’t suited for this. You can’t keep pointing to people’s home networks as the problem—the solution should be to make Roon less dependent on the network, not more.
Every other streaming service or media server works flawlessly in my home, even over Wi-Fi—except Roon. They’ve been telling us for years that Roon works differently, but as a customer, I don’t really care if it’s different. I just want it to work. I’m not interested in the technology behind it—I just see that services like Spotify are lightning fast and flawless every time, while Roon’s performance feels unpredictable, almost like it depends on the weather.
Yes, I still use Roon because it does have some great features and don’t get me wrong here I prefer the interface and local file integration way above Spotify, but the slowness and the frustrating search engine leave me with a love/hate relationship. It’s hard to ignore those downsides.
Endpoints should work well on WiFi. “Works fine for me” but absolutely can be broken for other people. Still, the point stands that any server, including Roon Core, should be hardwired. With WiFi generally being half-duplex, Roon Core on WiFi can either receive data from Tidal, or send it to the endpoint. But not both at the same time. This might work some of the time, but not necessarily all of the time.
Of course if only the endpoints are wireless, and there are still issues, then there is a problem somewhere, possibly within Roon itself.
Thank you for this response to my threadg. I don’t understand, however, why the Roon Core must be hardwired at this point in the 21st Century. Both Tidal and Apple use WiFi to stream their music from their servers elsewhere in the world then use the same WiFi to stream the music to a DAC/Amp or Wireless speakers etc.
The same thing applies to other streaming services. They all work over WiFi without any problems.
So I’m not arguing but asking a genuine question - why is it only Roon that has this problem?
Because the Roon server has full duplex tasks (receiving from Tidal and sending to one or more endpoints) but wifi isn’t full duplex and can only do one at a time, while the buffers in the endpoints are small for Roon Ready streaming to facilitate synced group playback, so they run out if there is too much delay. This is simply a different scenario than Tidal Connect or video streaming. And a wired server is the recommendation #1 in the Network Best Practices docs.
Thanks for this explanation but I still do t understand as Tidal also needs to receive from a Tidal server somewhere in the world at the same time as sending to endpoints. The same applies to Apple Music.
The even stranger example is that I’m able to stream significantly larger 4K UHD movie files than high res audio files at the same time as streaming to my TV.
I do appreciate you responding but I e had this discussion numerous times over the past years and the answer is always the same - connect the core to my router using Ethernet. Unfortunately the explanation makes no sense to me. I am probably being really stupid but why is Roon so different to Tidal or Apple when they’re doing exactly the same thing?
I sincerely don’t want to waste your time any further. As I mentioned there are hundreds of posts about this topic and all articulate exactly the same explanations and solutions. I just don’t get it so will need to investigate alternatives to Roon by exporting my playlists to Tidal or Apple or any other competing products out there. I paid for a lifetime subscription for Roon which was very expensive in my local currency (in South Africa our currency resembles Monopoly money more than the US $) and simply need to write of off.
I do appreciate your response and taking time out to do so when you must be frustrated with this issue being raised repeatedly.
If using Tidal Connect, the endpoint itself performs the streaming. The app is just a remote. Therefore, there is only one way traffic (receiving) on the steamer.
With Apple AirPlay from the app to an endpoint (or using Tidal app and streaming from there with e.g., AirPlay), there is indeed two way traffic from Tidal/Apple to app and from app to endpoint, but:
Buffers are likely bigger
The compressed FLAC file is transmitted and uncompressed on the steamer, hence the data is smaller (as opposed to Roon uncompressing on the server and sending PCM data to the endpoint)
At least with AirPlay, it’s limited to CD quality
The different approaches have pros and cons in each case.
Roon:
Pro: minimal load on the endpoint
Pro: endpoint does not need to know anything about codecs or streaming services; can’t really become obsolete
Pro: DSP happens on powerful server, independent of endpoint
Pro: synced group playing works with devices from different manufacturers
Con: higher network load, more sensitive to latency
Direct streaming:
Pro: lower network load, bigger buffers and less demanding
Con: all work done on the endpoint which can’t be as lightweight computationally
Con: DSP often impossible
Con: Endpoint needs to know about streaming service. Direct streaming (like Tidal Connect, not via app) only works if specifically implemented on streamer. New streaming services may not become available if manufacturer does not update firmware (common for older devices; witness the outcry on manufacturer forums if $10k devices aren’t updated to new streaming service offerings)
Con: buffer sizes differ between endpoints, making sync problematic
In the end, the different approaches have merits for different scenarios but some of Roon‘s USPs are only possible with the Roon approach.
This explanation about how Roon does things differently is understandable, but at the end of the day, the customer doesn’t really care about the technical details. What matters is that the experience is often slow or simply doesn’t work as expected. Have you ever compared a search between Roon and Spotify? It’s honestly shocking how much faster Spotify is, consistently, without ever slowing down.
Roon isn’t a music service, it’s a music player service, so that’s where it’s supposed to excel. But instead, it’s one of the slowest responding music players out there. This isn’t about audio quality, features, or the user interface—it’s about stability and speed. And in that area, Roon is far behind the competition.
The hardware or configuration blame gets thrown around a lot, but even their own Nucleus system doesn’t seem to fully solve the issue and still has memory leakage issues. Rather than pointing fingers at customers’ setups, the focus should be on making Roon less dependent on those variables. After 8 years of these recurring issues, the explanation that ‘Roon works differently’ feels like a weak answer. It might be time to rethink the approach, or risk falling behind the competition
Roon should at least over a proxied streaming or direct streaming model. This is one thing LMS trumps Roon. Give user the option and give the caveats of both models that suits their needs, these days the format support is pretty much a none issue and converting all to pcm seems real overkill. But the two hop structure isnt needed either in probably most use cases.
The other thing they care about is, I guess, that Roon can do the things that are unique to it. Such as DSP, for instance. And I have seen on the Naim forum the complaints if Naim can’t add Qobuz to older streamers, for instance. As I said, there’s pros and cons to either approach, but you can’t just ignore the things that the other approaches simply can’t provide at all.
My comment was purely about the network issues, I didn’t comment on other stuff.
I’m not very interested in search and always found what I needed, but I have simple needs. Clearly the Roon search could be better.
I had zero problems with this in 4 years, but I also don’t think that I can safely ignore the official recommendations