Yesterday there was an update to the Roon main app & I ran that.
This morning I got a message saying that ARC had successfully updated to the latest version.
Now, when I launch ARC it tells me “Time for an update. Roon Server cannot connect with this version of ARC. Please update your Roon Server to reconnect.”
I’ve checked the settings in the main app & both Roon Remote & Roon Server are showing as up to date.
So, let’s assume that ARC’s error message is spurious & it doesn’t actually know anything about my server updates & that it simply cannot connect, so it’s picking an error message at random.
I would immediately assume that it has something to do with port forwarding, or possibly my crappy internet.
I tried pressing the reset button next to the port forwarding number, but that didn’t fix anything.
Of course it didn’t, it’s never going to be that easy.
So, what next? The Port Forwarding Trouble Shooting pages start by telling me to check for “UPnP or NAT-PMP”.
Before I go through the pain of dealing with Sky TV & trying to figure out why the router won’t accept my password to access the advanced settings, is there any more obvious thing I could look into to try & fix this?
This a bit extreme, but when there is an early access update for ARC I delete the app on my phone and install the update as a new installation. I rarely use the download function, which you will wipe if you use this method, but the fresh install has not let me down so far and I have rock solid connection via ARC.
The only issue is that I lose all my downloads when I do that & it’s a real pain to have to do them all again. (I live in North Wales & there are many places I go where there is no internet at all so a few downloads is essential.
This spurious version mismatch happened many times recently. Reinstalling the app always helped (though you lose downloads yada yada). Roon is investigating in one of the many threads that you will find with the forum search
Well, I’ve re-installed the app. It’s currently “syncing with Roon Server for the first time…” which, given that I have 22,336 albums, may take some time.
The idea of being able to access any one of 22,000 albums from anywhere really appeals to me but frankly it just doesn’t work in practice.
This will largely be to do with my internet connection & the 4G signal in more rural parts of Wales, so I can’t really blame anyone else for that, but today I was playing downloaded music from my phone. It was mostly okay. It got snarled up towards the end & I was driving, so I couldn’t see why.
I’ve heard expressions used on here to do with “pinging the server” & it occurs to me that if ARC needs an internet connection to play music from my phone, then the developers need to have a word with themselves.
It also occurs to me that a major improvement to ARC would be for downloaded music to be separate to the app so that it’s still there after a re-install, but I have no idea what the implications of that would be.
I’m in the same situation with regards to phone capacity, so it might be time for me to bite the bullet & find an alternative solution for music on the move.
All I know is that I never had any problem using Foobar on my phone.
I gave up on ARC after being let down too many times by losing my downloads, having to reinstall or just having it refusing to work.
Now I am generally happily settled on PlexAmp and Symfonium (wonderful Android app) and I have about 1000 albums offlined and can reliably play any of my albums streaming as well as both connect to my Plex server which is generally very reliable and shares the same server with Roon.
You might also want to check out iBroadcast which another user here recommended to me and you can play your own library after uploading at a reasonable cost.
I’m in a similar place as ARC now refuses to see my downloads when no internet or in offline mode. Doesn’t matter if its had a recent sync or not it won’t let me access them as soon as online I can. Was fine prior to latest update. This is ARC last chance with me. I am not wasting time again for it to happen again. I have no option but to use downloads or suffer bad playback as cellular is spotty on my commute and ARC can’t cope at all.
I was an early beta tester for ARC and I recall when it worked with even my prob only 15-17k albums then? It was the most amazing thing having non-streaming service accessible music be accessible from my hard drive anywhere in the world. It’s been over a year now that I gave up. @enno Can we get some of those Harman/Samsung resources on this? I see no reason for a smart playlist with my current listening habits (maybe that will change?), but working ARC for us with large libraries would be a dream. I’d love to not have to use Tailscale too. You can do it!
+1 for Plexamp, due to it’s caching ahead of tracks I never have to worry about the music stopping. I only use the download function when abroad.
I too had ARC fall on me when driving like your scenario, more than once, it’s totally unreliable and I’ll never install it again.
Absolutely and PlexAmp has some great control features for how much to cache as well.
It does make you wonder if features like this would make ARC more reliable
Are you in London? I find ARC useless if not using downloads due to how up/down data is in the capital and it bombs out and wont reconnect too often on my commute. PlexAmps caching really helps negate this scenario. I have it set to 10 tracks on WiFi and 5 on Cellular. When I leave the office it doesn’t switch to using Cellular until I am almost home.
Mine is set to cache 15 tracks both WiFi and cellular, with a cache size of 64gb, I play full albums only and tend to queue several albums at once so it works well.
I don’t download anything unless I’m going abroad.
No I don’t live in London, gf lives there and I’m there more often than my own place as I can work anywhere.
I don’t have an issue in the capital with cellular, I’ll sometimes change the play queue on cellular, so it just caches in the background.
I’m on O2, use a pixel phone, unlimited data.
I’m using O2 network and it’s very poor SE London and central especially when I am sat on a Train waiting to leave at Charing Cross. Tried all the networks and none fair better. I barely get any phone reception in my house and we are not that far from a local cellular relay. Just lots of people and old housing that seems to interfere quite badly.
