Looking at “Permissions” on the “App info” page for Arc in Android, it appears to want to use “Music and audio” and “Photos and video” permissions. I’ve enabled these to help debug a problem (Roon ARC Playback Pauses on Google Pixel 6a (ref#LDX7OA)), but why would Arc even need these permissions in the first place?
It needs to store downloaded music in ARC?
I’m pretty sure it downloads music to “internal” storage which doesn’t require any permissions. The “Music and audio” permission gives an app permission to access audio media directories within the user’s home directory like Audiobooks and Music.
Good point. Maybe the much requested ability to store and read external music is on the way 
I checked on iOS and it doesn’t have such permissions, so no idea why it has them on Android
This would be a dream come true! I have a Fiio m11 with a 1tb memory card. Would love to be able to store music on this for offline listening while travelling or on airplanes. Of course, Roon needs to als fix the offline experience of Arc, but maybe one day 
Hi @seadowg,
We’ll confirm the answer with development here, since you’re right that it’s not entirely expected that ARC (a music playback app) would be requesting these permissions.
You can deny ARC access to both of these locations without consequence. Most users don’t encounter these prompts - this is most likely a development decision to make room for future feature allotment or to ensure data collection compliance. It may be an inadvertent consequence of the way interruption handling (phone calls, etc) and image caching occur in ARC.