I’m having difficulties all the time with roon getting all sorts of stuff served over the net.
Whole categories of what should normally be displayed just fail to show up completely.
When I do get albums suggested, roon cannot actually get them on after my clicking on them.
Also, connection to Tidal and now even Qobuz fails.
Seems, all of a sudden there’s a problem with getting through my VPN. Which is working just fine with my browser and everything else.
I’m not going to dispense with my privacy protection just to stream music. Ridiculous.
Get your stuff together, and soon.
I’m fed up with all the constant error messages, missing connections and what have you.
How did you do this? If the VPN is behaving properly, then Roon should be unaffected by the VPN ( as one would assume the exemption feature in the VPN software does).
Tell us what the VPN software is and how you exempted and we’ll try to figure out what’s misconfigured.
And just btw I activated what’s apparently called „split tunnel“ and told the VPN NOT to apply to roon.
I can do that by individual app.
Also, I’ve been using the VPN for quite a long time by now, and mostly there were no issues.
Why they are coming up now, who knows.
Basically, I would like to use VPN even for roon, because it’s nobody’s business what music taste I have, but I guess it’s not THAT sensitive an issue either.
I am having the same experience. For months, everything was going fairly smoothly. Now and then the connection to Tidal seemed to fail, but no big issues mostly.
All of a sudden it’s making trouble, for days and days, and it turns out it DOES depend on my using a VPN.
And yes, you ought to take my geographical location from my account data. It’s not like anyone is accessing roon as an anonymous in the first place. Every single request for a bit of audio or even meta data can be traced as coming from me. So why would you need “physical” proof of me being in the country I told you to be my place of living? By using an IP address?
I can do online banking over VPN. I can trade stocks or crypto over VPN. Thousands of bucks worth.
But you are getting nervous about paying fees for lyrics that probably amount to a tiny fraction of 1 cent?
Currently I have switched the VPN partially off for the sake of using roon smoothly.
But please take note that I will tolerate your policy only for a short period.
You are practically interfering with my right to privacy protection, and I’m not going to accept that.
You can absolutely talk to Roon servers over VPN, including faking out your geo-IP based location. Nothing is stopping you from doing that in Roon.
I believe when people say Roon does not work with VPN, they are not talking about our cloud services, but instead talking about local LAN stuff, which VPNs are notorious for interfering with (for valid reasons).
When you bank online or trade stocks, you do it by connecting to the services running the cloud. Roon works just fine like that too. But your bank or brokerage does not need to discover local audio devices or remote into your Core.
It’s still not 100% clear to me where the VPN is failing you. Roon accessing TIDAL or Qobuz is no different than their own apps accessing TIDAL or Qobuz. If there is an issue here, we should check logs and see what’s the problem – 99% of the time it’s DNS or something just blocking access.
I acknowledge that you have to deal with all different kinds of people’s individual configurations and are not the wizard of Oz, or something.
Yet my setup is really not a complicated or exotic one:
Roon core on the iMac, the iMac AND the blue sound streaming module connected via LAN, controlling mostly by the remote on an iPad via Wifi.
The problem though does in my experience not lie with the iPad reaching the iMac. I had the same problem on my iMac itself. Also, why should VPN interfere with Wifi?
Which WAS a problem was getting YOUR cloud-based stuff, including suggestions, statistics and everything, which has nothing whatsoever to do with discovering local audio devices or doing remote stuff, and connecting to the services.
That’s just what I experienced. Exactly where the trick is being played, I have no idea.
What DNS might have to do with it, is equally unclear to me. Why should that be dependent on turning VPN on or off?
what is the symptom and setup when you have the problem.
at what date/time (dont’ forget timezone) were you able to reproduce this?
I have your Core’s logs going back to right before Jan 30th, so I can look.
If you can’t remember, that’s fine. Just reproduce it again with the VPN and note the time. Then go back to non-VPN so I can ask Roon to send the logs.
Lots of users quick to blame roon here when in most cases it’s poor network config at home or poor use of the split tunnel function within the vpn client.
In some cases vpn providers (or your work vpn) may advertise an IP address pool that overlaps with your home network. When that happens the Various things on your computer that need network access can’t understand how to route to each other.
If you’re having trouble accessing roon while using a vpn. Roon isn’t your problem, your network setup is. Point the blame elsewhere.
It happens to me with work, you just need to tell your VPN to send the IP address of your roon core over the LAN rather than the VPN tunnel.
I want to see the logs… I’m sure it’ll tell us instantly whether the user is getting host not found, a name resolution failure, a timeout, or something strange that is causing Roon to blow up. It’s almost always the former situations, but it has been Roon’s fault too, so I’d like to check before saying what is broken.
Also, some VPNs block LAN access. Some block random IP blocks because they happen to be on nanny lists.
I used VPNs for a year or so in Brasil to get around internet provider issues with Roon-Qobuz-Tidal. I no longer need to use them because something changed in my ISP’s network. But out of curiosity, after reading the beginning of this thread three days ago I put VPNs back into the equation to see whether I would experience the problems described. I tried both PIA and Surfshark, both with basic configurations (No split tunnelling) and connecting to servers in Florida.
No problems in three days.
This noontime there was something of a glitch and both Tidal and Qobuz were disconnected.
(On the iMac / core, not remote.)
Seems to have repaired itself, as it were.
I’m running VPN again and for a day or two, it worked. Let’s just see whether or not that is reliable.
Whereas before I did the post, it must have been for 4 or 5 days in a row when Tidal was not able to connect and all kinds of stuff couldn’t be loaded.
And when I finally started fiddling around, it obviously was dependent on VPN running or not. Just a fact.
That’s why I did the post in the first place.
I’m not making this up, out of boredom or something.
It really sounds like the use of the VPN is the culprit here. If it was Roon, Roon would either be broken or not always, due to how the VPN interacts with the operating system. It wouldn’t be intermittent.
Intermittent issues like you are having, are a sign that your VPN is working correctly and it hasn’t affected Roon badly at all. It’s just your traffic is getting routed into places that cause connectivity issues for TIDAL.
Do you really need to route your TIDAL streaming via VPN? I get the VPN use argument, but if you have something working without VPN and you don’t actually care about the bounce to another ISP, do you really need to introduce more internet-hops for something so real-time in nature?
Not sure that I do understand what you mean with intermittent and what that supposedly proves.
If there is a problem between what I’m using roon for and the VPN and/or the OS, how is that automatically NOT the fault of roon software architecture and operational procedures and data request handling?
How is it I’m using other streaming services, and for video stuff, too, and NEVER have ANY issue with VPN or OS? Only with roon? Would that not in some probability indicate YOUR stuff has a problem?
On a scale up to ten, the reliability of all other media stuff I’m using is about 9.5 or higher, whereas roon barely reaches like 6?
Also, when I lose connection to Tidal, it’s obviously not about STREAMING, because for that to happen I would have to be connected in the first place, right? I’m not even reaching the catalogue front page.
And then WHEN I’m streaming, that wouldn’t necessarily be via VPN either. Mostly, I’m directing the stuff through my blue sound node, and between that and the cloud servers there is NO VPN whatsoever, because I have not installed the thing on my Router.
Also, I’m just tired with having to justify my use of VPN. Also, it’s funny how I get called names and ridiculed for it by some pawn of yours, but when I react accordingly, all hell breaks loose and I’m being censored. GORGEOUS.
Real-time in nature? Are you kidding me? An audio stream, CD-quality?
On a DSL network with 100 MBits?
It’s not like every bit is pushed through in “real time” without getting buffered, right?
And for a whole second of sound I would need like … let me reckon … like 15 KByte ???
And again, I don’t have any kind of discernible time lag with other media stuff via browser. AT ALL.
With Roon, all music goes to the RoonServer first, is processed into PCM, and then sent to the Node. So, if RoonServer is using VPN then all incoming streaming is using VPN.
There are different buffers at play as well. The buffering time for an incoming stream is different, than, the buffer time used by RAAT is handling the music distribution in your internal network.