I have tried 3 different USB DACs now and can’t get any one of them to work with Roon. I was able to get Roon to play over a networked Raspberry Pi2 but only at 44.1 kHz, no hi-rez or DSD! I cannot get anything to be recognized over USB. I have tried 3 different DACs, a new Sony UDA-1, iFi Nano and Meridian Explorer. Roon recognizes these DACs and allows me to enable them, but I get the following error messaging when I try to play any song:
TRANSPORT: Playback has failed due to playback parameter negotiation with the audio device.
What is Roon trying to negotiate that all my other players aren’t negotiating? I have re-booted my iMac to ensure that Roon is the only audio application running. Still get the above message. If Roon recognizes and I can enable the DACs, why can’t I use them? Things that make you go hmmmmmmmmmmm.
I use Fidelia, Audirvana+, iTunes, BitPerfect and JRMC with no problems. I have a 5k iMac OS X 10.10.4 Yosemite, using 2 different USB ports, 3 different DACs. I assume latest version of Roon, downloaded last night.
This is going to be a very short trial if I don’t get some audio soon 8^). Thanks in advance.
I’m discussing with the team, and I’ll follow up. I think there’s a known issue with some iFi gear, and last I heard they were sending us some hardware for testing, so we should have that working soon.
The Meridian Explorer should definitely work, so I’m checking on that as well – I know a few people on our team have one on hand, so I may need some more information from you to get sense of the issue. We’ll figure out what’s going on here, and then we can make sure you have the full 14 days to try out Roon once things are working.
Stand by – I’ll come back to you on this. Sorry for the trouble!
Thanks for the quick reply. I am not too worried about getting the Meridian Explorer working, it is my travel DAC. I really need to get the iFi Nano and the Sony UDA-1 working with Roon. I do so want this to work 8^). Thanks again for the quick reply.
Yesterday I saw the problem twice with my Meridian Explorer², too. It was the first time and I use roon some weeks. After roon restart or the DAC unplug all was OK again and I could start the music from the point where it has stopped. I saw a “similar” problem with JRiver even if the info text was different.
@cas, It may not be safe to run JRiver (or other exclusive mode audio apps) and Roon at the same time pointed at the same device. Any chance that you have multiple apps trying to use the app in exclusive mode at the same time?
@brian
JRiver doesn’t run in the background. It’s just installed on the computer. I try to install JRiver on media (USB Disk) (a very cool idea) and with JRiver 21 it’s possible on any Windows. Windows 10 let me do it with any app, but… roon ;). It would be great to have this option with roon, too.
I rebooted the iMac and did not have any other audio programs running. Roon was the only app running, so it had full access to audio from my iMac. Still nothing. Same error.
TRANSPORT: Playback has failed due to playback parameter negotiation with the audio device.
@brian, that happened to me in the middle of playing a song. The sound hit a infinite repeating loop and afterwards gave the transport error. Not sure what happened as nothing else was touching the sound stream and it only ever happened once, but I thought i’d chip in.
Got your e-mail but have not had a chance to get things set up to grab some logs. Here is something unusual . . . when I first got Roon and couldn’t get USB audio to work, I tried to use a network connection to my Raspberry Pi 2 and it worked . . . iMac > ethernet > Airport Extreme > ethernet > Raspberry Pi 2 > USB > iFi Nano. Worked fine except it did not do any hi-rez, only Redbook 44.1 kHz. So just now, I tried an Airport Express on ethernet and it is working. So Airplay works, but USB audio still doesn’t. I will try to get some logs in the next day or two.
Thanks for the explanation. Would the plug-ins be in the Library > Audio > Plug-ins folder? I have 4 folders with only HAL having any content. With VST, MAS and Components are empty folders. The content of HAL is Airplay.driver, AppleAVBAudio.driver, BluetoothAudioPlugIn.driver, CmediaDSF.plugin, InstantOn.driver, and iSightAudio.driver.
Winner, winner, chicken dinner!!! That did it. I removed the CMediaDSF.plugin. Only problem I have now is that the sample rate does not change automatically with the Sony UDA-1, but does for the Meridian Explorer. Thanks for the assistance guys. Please let Mike know.
I don’t need to reset my trial period. Thanks for offering.
Got this figured out. My fault with the Roon settings. Working fine now.
I do have a couple of other issues. It appears the Sony UDA-1 required a plug-in which caused Roon to not play audio through USB. The plug-in CMediaDSF.plugin is the culprit. My other Mac players, JRMC, Audirvana+, Fidelia, BitPerfect and iTunes do not seem to be affected by this. They all play fine when I have this plug-in in the Audio > Plugin folder. I hope a solution is forth coming.
To play DSD files from my iMac to the Sony UDA-1 I must have this plug-in installed. I do not want to purchase Roon if I have to manually keep installing the CMediaDSF.plugin plug-in when I want to play DSD files to the UDA-1. Any chance you guys will be able to program around this plug-in which inhibits Roon from playing when installed? I sure hope so, I like Roon a lot.
I played some DSD files from Roon with the DSD to PCM conversion and they seem to play okay, but occasionally on every song played, it stops unexpectedly. I am writing this from work and do not recall if it is in beta. At any rate, it is getting closer to being an all purpose player for me. Hope you guys can get this stuff figured out. Thanks again for the support.
The CMediaDSF issue is tricky–we are not actually using the plugin, but we are able to trace a crash to inside the plugin when it’s present. We’ve also never reproduced this in-house (only remotely, on customer systems).
These things are not allowed to crash (assuming they’re playing by the rules). When a crash happens inside of the plugin under circumstances like these, it indicates a bug with the plugin, not the app.
It may be that something about the behavior of those other apps hides or suppresses the issue in the plugin–but it’s really anyone’s best guess. We don’t have access to the internal details of the plugins or those other apps to know for sure.
It’s frustrating when vendors ship buggy plugins like this, because it puts us in a difficult position of hunting for workarounds for their errors.
If you can upload it, it would help us to have a copy of the broken plugin–I’m going to PM you with some details.
I couldn’t upload the actual plug-in, but was able to upload the .dmg file that the plug-in came to me as a package. The title of it is SONY_USB_DAC_Amp_Driver_(Mac)_V1.1. Thanks for the continued effort to figure this one out.