Hello all. I am disabled inasmuch that I am unable to play an LP nor even load a CD. With this constraint I have put together a system which is wholly digital and is controlled via my iPad. My streamer is a Zenith Mk3. I stream Tidal/Qobuz and being old school if I particularly like an album I will buy the CD and rip it.
But what happens if the internet goes down? I am savvy enough to know that I will not be able to stream music, and that my Tidal/Qobuz ‘saved’ music will disappear from Roon. But assuming my home WiFi is working, what will work? Will Roon still operate? Or would I be able to control my ripped music directly from the Zenith? I’m guessing I would need another App to facilitate this? Or would it all go down the plug hole and I would have to wait for the internet to come back on!?
It’ll continue working, Roon needs to phone home occasionally though, but not often enough to interfere with your usage during some downtime.
Thank you, that is good to know.
Try it and see what happens…easy enough to pull the modem off your router and you are internet free.
You might also try rebooting the core machine when offline to check it does allow you to connect to Roon Core again on your remote. Don’t recall I have tried this.
Last night, AT&T had a serious problem in our area and we lost Internet access… this occurred when I was listening to music via Roon and yet the music continued to play. I was still able to control it from my iPad. I was surprised, pleased, and more than a bit curious as to how it still worked.
Then, maybe about 30 minutes later, the music stopped and my iPad could no longer find my Roon Core nor could my iPhone… I figured all good things must pass and my use of Roon without internet had come to an end. I then went to the Win PC that was running my Roon Core, and from there I was able to restart music in the zone I had been listening. Amazingly, the music still played! Roon was still working!
Bottom line… how is this possible and is it by design? I finally went to bed so I have no idea how long Roon would have continued to work without internet access. Does anyone have any insight on this?
P.S… my anxiety did shoot through the roof when it dawned on me that I might be without internet access during this pandemic. I was more than slightly relieved when I could still use Roon to listen to music. Fortunately, when I got up this morning, AT&T had restored my internet access and all was well. (well, yeah, except for the whole pandemic thing 
Well assuming the music you were listening too was either downloaded from tidal/quboz or your own rips then yes it should carry on as normal. You are running roon server somewhere in your house and your router although not connected to WAN still has a grip on the devices in the LAN so things should proceed.
The only time I have seen this come undone is if there is a sort of half way house where you have access to WAN but the DNS is screwed, that can make things like roon go south quickly.
This happened to me today. Comcast went down. My core is on a Mac, and I was listening via Roon on that same Mac. The music was stored on my NAS. The song that was playing when Comcast went down, continued but then that was it. The next song on the album wouldn’t play, nor would any other local music via. I could still connect to my NAS over the intranet, but Roon would freeze up on anything.
FWIW, the Core (my Mac) and the NAS are both hardwired to a Netgear switch that is hardwired to a Google WiFi router which is connected to my Comcast modem.
Sounds like this used to not be the case, so maybe this is a recent regression?
I don’t know if it’s a regression. There is the case where one is going up to a cottage for a weekend and brings their laptop and Roon. That is the case most people refer to.
In your case, you had a crash. IDK if Roon is designed to function without a care if the internet and router services are unexpectedly terminated. One way to tell would be to turn everything off (Roon core, endpoints, clients and router) then turn things back on. That would more closely replicate the ‘going to the cottage’ scenario. I’d probably turn off my streaming service as well to be sure Roon isn’t trying to ping it for information.
This question comes up regularly and I have only seen about three different responses:
1 Theoretically Roon should keep playing local content, assuming that it doesn’t need to do a licence check that day.
2 Roon keeps playing for a song or album then stops working.
3 Roon stops almost immediately and requires internet restored to work again.
I guess that the answer depends upon several factors related to your network configuration and that Roon would need to look at your logs to see what the logged error message was and why it stopped Roon in its tracks.
Factors that may have an impact could possibly be:
DHCP verses fixed IPs for all Roon components
How your router behaves when it loses the WAN connection
How Roon behaves when DNS/DHCP services stop working
It would be nice to have some technical input from Roon on why Roon may fail if the internet goes down, because for some it clearly does and is an issue that may discourage potential users.
Hello, original OP here.
I don’t fully understand some of the techno talk above but my system is still the same as originally described, all is hard wired apart from my iPad.
Just occasionally my BT home hub has a hissy fit and starts flashing it’s amber / green lights at me whilst it reconnects, whether I’m listening to music or not, and always reconnects within a couple of minutes.
However, when listening to music my iPad always loses it’s connection to my Zenith, thus I am without music, including my ripped music.
It was this problem that prompted my original post, and it still occurs occasionally. I have had no need to try rebooting devices etc (and it is not so easy for me to do) as advised above as my internet is only down for two or three minutes and then all is restored.
It would still be nice to know how to exactly get round this problem if the internet went down for a substantially longer time.
Oh dear,
A penny has just dropped! The problem I describe above is MY Wi-fi going down, not the internet! Doh!
So music probably will carry on for a certain amount of time as has been suggested.
It happens to us all, don’t worry… 