VPN interfering with Roon

Support
45

Here:

in·ter·mit·tent
adjective

  1. occurring at irregular intervals; not continuous or steady.
    “intermittent rain”

If it’s working fine now, but it wasn’t earlier, that would imply that it is an intermittent problem, not continuous or steady. Maybe I misunderstood you, but I got that from this:

Let me provide an example: We had a user in a country who used VPN because TIDAL was unavailable to him, and this allowed him to stream TIDAL into his country for use with Roon. One day, his system became unreliable. Specifically, the logins were unreliable into TIDAL. It wa’sn’t always happening, but the problem was becoming more and more often over about 3 months. When he turned off the VPN, he couldn’t use the service at all, so there was no possibility of comparing. We had no answer for him. Turns out, he switched VPN providers and all started working again. The VPN provider he was using had exit nodes that were being blocked somewhere along the way. TIDAL wasn’t blocking them, but when TIDAL’s CDN changed some stuff around, they must have blocked providers that were being used for attacks/abuse.

Funny thing is, at some later point, TIDAL was introduced into his country. He stopped using the VPN, and things were quite unreliable. The CDN infrastructure in his country was not effective. Going back to the VPN fixed things up for him.

I’m not saying this is your situation. You asked how it’s not automatically the fault of Roon, and I’ve provided you with an example.

I’m not attacking the idea of the VPN. I’m attacking the idea that when something doesn’t work, it’s Roon and not the culprit in the situation that is known to cause issues.

When you stream via a web browser, you may not be using the same audio streams, you may not be using the same CDN endpoints. We know for fact that is often the case for both TIDAL and Qobuz.

But also, think about the hundreds of thousands of Roon users that have no problem logging in or streaming. Does that imply that Roon works? Of course not. There could be bad situations here we are not considering. The last Roon release contained a lot of work to stream content more efficiently and in a manner that would impact your network less. For 6 years that we were in business before that, a less efficient and more impactful streaming system existed.

I know very little about your system or your issues, which is why I asked you to reproduce the issue and let me check logs. I have not received any actionable information from you, so it’s hard for me to diagnose this properly. Your feelings on the matter are valid, but they are just another input into the diagnosis. More information is required to make this actionable.

46

Well, we don’t know if his VPN hooks LAN traffic or just default gateway traffic. In fact, we know very little here. It’s not even clear to me what the “issue” is. His last post seems to imply it’s just related to login to TIDAL and not actually streaming content.

47

Yeah, I’m really a dumb person, sorry.
The issue is NOT the streaming. I have NEVER even remotely indicated or implied I have a problem with streaming.

The thing is a) not connecting to Tidal and/or Qobuz to begin with and b) even with being connected or apart from that, partly I’m not getting catalogue or meta data or suggestions or whatever on the GUI. You know, like account specific data.

Once I can see an album on the screen and tap “play”, it plays. But I’m not even getting that far in the first place.

That’s why I didn’t get the “real time” stuff, too. Because that’s not where the “issue” is, which in fact is an actual issue without quotes.

Also, I don’t understand why the streaming should be done via the core, and then the stream gets re-directed to the actual audio device?
The blue sound is perfectly capable of getting stuff from the internet directly. Why would you not have it do that with stuff indicated by roon?

But of course, I don’t care how you do it as long as it works consumer-friendly and reliably.

48

With Roon you could apply DSP to the audio you’re getting from Tidal, or you might want to play that stream to a zone consisting of multiple devices. It’s just more efficient to let the core this.

49

Taking all content into the core (to do any processing) and then distributing it to endpoints is a core USP of Roon - this separation of concerns for many people “is” Roon. If you don’t want this, you shouldn’t be using Roon. Some view this as the core (no pun intended) reason they use Roon, and take the content / metadata / navigation / local + streaming integration as secondary. Some choose Roon for the content reasons and stream only and wish Roon didn’t play via a core. Unfortunately, you can’t have one without the other (though some have expressed a wish that Roon would offer a “light” or web-only version that got rid of the core, and some have speculated that some recent moves are making it more possible for Roon to do just that, it’s all just completely bald-faced speculation).

50

Yeah, maybe I shouldn’t indeed.

There may or may not be valid reasons for the “core” architecture, but for me as a consumer that is just background stuff I don’t want to be bothered with, basically.

I want a nice GUI and the integration and it has to work without me having to earn a degree in informatics.
And it should be robust for any kind of normal private customer config, which it really isn’t.

Also, have fun with making sure roon is only used by people who deserve it. I’m not one of them, it seems.

51

I want a nice GUI and the integration and it has to work without me having to earn a degree in informatics.
And it should be robust for any kind of normal private customer config, which it really isn’t.
Also, have fun with making sure roon is only used by people who deserve it. I’m not one of them, it seems.

Gosh, no judgment was intended there. I simply meant it was a (currently) existential characteristic of the product of which you & any potential purchaser should be aware. Like “if you don’t want to be responsible for doing any maintenance, you probably don’t want to own a vehicle” or “if you don’t want to break any eggs, you probably shouldn’t make an omelette”.

I don’t have anything clever to say about VPNs. Some people here seem to use them with ease at some times in some circumstances. So they’re not a priori bad / busted. Some of the same people have had horrible times with them in different circumstances, some beyond their control. Routing tables are not for the faint of heart. The way in which VPNs have been sold is frankly irresponsible as far as I’m concerned (I think they do far less to safeguard you in reality than has been implied/ promised, and far more to change your actual networking set up). But most people don’t also have delicate networking applications / operate true servers dependent on real-time presentation of data. And most people who do operate those kinds of servers on premise don’t also use VPNs. But some do. The interaction effects are not “bog standard”. You’re trying to do two different things. They may or may not play move together, depending on a lot of implementations. At the end of the day, it’s your choice which one to go with or just how deep down the rabbit hole of trying to get them to work together you want to go. I wish you luck. If you do decide to go for it, there’s lots of people here who I’m sure would be happy to help - but it won’t be low effort.

52

As I said before, isn’t it funny or rather telling that NO other media platform I’m using, including HD video, has anywhere near that kind of problems.
To anonymize my data requests over the internet, going around ISP servers, vs. running audio streams within my own house and over a LAN ought not to interfere.
Yet it’s not even about the actual streaming, it’s just about the basic stuff showing up in the GUI. That’s more or less like looking on a web page generated by any old CMS.

That being said:
Don’t blow up streaming 1 (!) stereo audio into a challenge on the same level as sending men onto the surface of the moon. It’s ridiculous.
I can stream like a hundred stereo (CD quality) voices in real time AND have them handled in all kinds of manners AND record them AND produce virtual instruments, all parallel and seamlessly, on my silly private desktop.
Also, the DSL can do 100 Mbits/s. That’s about at least three by ten by ten times the amount of data I need for listening to a stereo file.

Reserve that kind of argument for people who cannot count beyond 20.

53

Welcome to an application coded for 1990s networking concepts. Still waiting in 2.x to bring this software into streamingville. I have the same issues with client networks I connect to with split tunneling it interferes with roon. It’s just not made well from the ground up transport wise imo needs a total overhaul of its networking and a streaming mode like plex does which handles all this fine. Roon is on borrowed time it feels like using a modern computer on dialup. They need to fix the slow network speed and incompatibilities asap.

1 Like
55

And again, no connection to both services, Tidal and Qobuz.
Again, no connecting to Tidal again while VPN is on.
Again, connection to Qobuz re-established and off again.
Again, not even this page is accessible with VPN on.

You guys have one more week to fix this, or it’s over. I’m completely fed up.
I’m not going to pay 10 Euro per month for a service that doesn’t even provide any audio itself, just some GUI and some metadata. And then it doesn’t even work properly, except sometimes, with luck.

This is purely ridiculous. And I don’t care to hear more bloody excuses or have myself blamed for daring to use a first class, paid for VPN service.

56

I found the place in the log where it failed. it seems a lot of things, including your qobuz login request, started timing out. That just means something (qobuz, their network, your network, your machine, etc…) prevented some form of communication.

But then, ~3 hours later, it worked. Did that successful login happen when the VPN was still “on” or did you disable the VPN when it worked? or did you just configure it differently?

Can you also show us your VPN configuration and what exceptions you have in for Roon? Also, I asked very early in this thread, but I don’t think I got an answer… what VPN software are you using?

It’d also be good to know where you are and where your VPN exits you. You obviously don’t have to tell us, but it may be information that can help us understand what’s going on. If you don’t feel like sharing this information publicly, PM me.

57

Right now, I have VPN off in order to have roon work at all.
While for a day or two it seemed to do well, with VPN.
And no, I’m not fiddling around with the overall config on my iMac.
I may have changed the VPN server in between, but since it’s anonymous anyway, that shouldn’t do harm, imho.

And I have ExpressVPN.

58

We have an idea of what is triggering your Roon issues. Here is something you can try to prove our theory. Try to disable this “Network Lock” feature of ExpressVPN. You will need to uncheck the checkbox noted here:

I’m not telling you to stop using the VPN, I just want to understand the issue better.

60

Similar issue here using NORDVPN, ROON, QOBUZ. ROON works fine via the VPN, QOBUZ web player works fine on the VPN. I enabled split tunneling for roon.exe and RAATserver (just guessing what to add). The problem seems to be authenticating my Qobuz credentials via ROON when the VPN is on. I can disable the VPN, authenticate my Qobuz account via ROON, re-enable the VPN and it seems to work (not sure for how long yet). Is there another .exe that does the QOBUZ authentication from ROON that could be added to the split tunneling?