Years of frustration with Roon - Sluggishness, drop-outs, and playlist issues

Roon Software Discussion
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This is just one of the many, many problems I have been experiencing for years while using Roon. Despite several updates, the performance remains unreliable, and frankly, the experience has become laughable.

Why is Roon always causing problems? It is frustratingly slow and sluggish, with regular drop-outs and buffer pauses lasting anywhere from 5 seconds to several minutes. It also randomly skips songs most of the time. This has been going on for years and is not improving at all.

All the updates Roon has released over the years—supposedly intended to make the software faster, achieve absolutely nothing. I haven’t noticed a single significant improvement.

Roon causes the most issues when playing my own, custom-made playlists (100–1000 songs). I often have to wait and see if the first song even starts, which often, unfortunately doesn’t or it does and soon the stutters and skipped songs return. Setting a playlist to shuffle is completely hopeless.

Streaming via Qobuz connect (normally not lately) Tidal Connect, and the Naim app works flawlessly. Normally Qobuz is my main streaming platform but has been particularly unreliable over the last few weeks via Roon, ARC, and Qobuz Connect due to well-known issues.

I often find myself shutting down the Roon Core again and switching to the much more reliable Tidal Connect or the Naim app instead. I even restart the Roon Core and my network every day to speed things up, but that is only a temporary fix; the problems always resurface very quickly.

I have a lifetime subscription to Roon; if I didn’t, I would have cancelled it a long time ago. It feels like Roon staff knows these issues exist but refuses to admit them, stringing users along with empty promises. It is incredibly frustrating to have such high-end hardware and still deal with a poorly engineered experience.

Will these problems at Roon ever be solved? I highly doubt it.

My Setup (Overkill for Roon):

Intel NUC 12th Gen Pro Kit (NUC12WSHi7) – Roon (ROCK) Core + RAM: 32GB
Network: 1000 Mbit fiber-optic (All other applications work lightning-fast)
Connection: Strictly wired Ethernet (no Wi-Fi used)
Settings: Fixed IPs for Core and switch; No DSP used
Library: 5,700 albums, 85,400 songs
Maintenance: Backups and background processes are scheduled at night.

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The ARC problem is currently a known issue that has something to do with Qobuz and affects several (many?) users. Though the precise cause is as of now unknown. This is being tracked here:

There was also another, possibly related Qobuz issue caused by Qobuz reorganizing servers. This affected not just Roon (the regular Roon, not ARC). It is partially improved but not fixed for everyone and is being tracked here:

Qobuz published this update:

For your other issues, you won’t make much headway here in the Uncategorized category of the forum. Your experience is not normal and I’d suggest opening a tech support case:

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I’m always amazed when I read a post like this, and grateful to have been lucky enough - apparently - to have run Roon (and Arc) without any major issues for six or seven years now. (And sorry for the OP, of course.)

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The problem with your situation, Robert, is most Roon users are not experiencing the problems that you are. Your system configuration is premium which makes your situation even more perplexing. I don’t think Roon is making empty promises. As I said, I suspect the majority of users are satisfied with Roon’s performance. I know I am. I’ve been using Roon for about five years and there have been occasional glitches (I got caught up in the latest Qobuz snafu). But 99% of the time it works very well. I use an I7 NUC with Rock and am on both ethernet and wifi and both configurations work well. Reading through your post it’s not clear if you’ve tried to get Roon support involved with your issues. If not it might be worth a try. There’s no reason your system should be doing what you’re describing.

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I empathize with you, Robert. I have been a Roon user since 2020, on a lifetime license since 2021. IMO, Roon is a great idea, but has been coded very poorly. A music server without anything playing using up 4 GB of RAM is textbook bad code. App scrolling in iOS is like Android in the early days: slow and struggling, with a lot of accidental taps and clicks. Just compare the scrolling on any other music app, you’ll see what I mean.

It’s not your network, not your system. It’s Roon.

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We are 4 days before a major update promised to give roon better performance, better handling of local computing recources, and reduced RAM consumption. Maybe you might want to wait for that one?

Some users are already testing it as some sort of beta / early-access release (dubbed Roon 2.65 Build1654, in case you are interested to join beta), and I can confirm that RAM consumption is significantly reduced, and some computing-intensive browsing operations apparently being snappier. My setup is not representative, and I never had serious problems since I have this machine, but there is hope.

I feel for you, and I have encountered similar problems in the past with several iterations of previous hardware. Although I have no idea what is causing your issues, and your setup looks like it has way more computing power than I ever had, I encourage you to investigate. In my experience, there is not this one issue or bottleneck causing all the problems, but a number of overlooked issues which combined might be causing roon to be sluggish. In some cases, removing the complete installation of roon server, deleting all database files and installing everything from scratch, helped.

I don´t subscribe to this, and apparently the majority of users does not have such issues. Without understanding what the OP´s exact problem is, gut feeling is telling me that there is some minor issue slowing everything down, such as roon having problems accessing its internal database (as it was the case with every single setup I have encountered problems with).

I am currently running a pretty complex library, similar in size to the OP´s one on a Celeron-euipped NAS w/o any SSD. Which means the roon database is on really big spinning disc HDD. On paper, this is way below minimum specs, but it is surprisingly snappy. Scrolling as smooth, as I knew it from much smaller libraries on really powerful machines.

So again: There is hope.

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This is my third year with Roon. I have been struggling a lot in the last weeks just like you are. I took my (difficult) decision not to renew. Moving to other platforms,

Roon is great at many things, but failing at playback is too much to bear for me. I prefer a simpler but working solution.

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I understand the frustration of those who’ve had problems with Roon but for balance I’ve had no significant problems with Roon playback over the past few years. I enjoy my music far more these days with Roon than when I used Audirvana with all of its bugs back then. Before Audirvana I used Amarra and that was even less reliable.

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Audirvana3 is no better you can’t even define how you want Artists sorting there are some artists are simply missing because the Artist_sort tag is wrong eg Claudio Abbado was sort by Berlin Philharmonic , so not in A not in C guess at B

Try JRiver, it’s very old school look (TreeViews and DataGrids) as it hasn’t changed in looks since I started using it 15 yrs ago BUT is rock solid. The audio side has been set for years and most change is about video. BUT no streaming support.

JRemote is an OK iOS/Android app which is what you really use.

The good bit is the response from the tech side who get a request if they like it they do it and release it all within weeks . They release updates almost weekly

Considering all Roon isn’t that bad after all

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The likelihood is that the problem is related to your setup.

Best advice would be to backup your database, and then do a full uninstall and reinstall and restore the database. See if that makes a difference.

But it could be as easy as tweaking some settings on your server or changing your DNS server on your network.

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I agree with the OP because the performance of ROON on my system has slowly degraded over time. I’ve had a lifetime license since 2019. My system has changed over time, but no changes at all in the last two years, yet performance has been getting slower and slower. I use local library and Qobuz exclusively. Qoubuz using the app is often better than using ROON. i’ve tried many suggested work arounds, reboots, etc. I’m using a Nucleus Plus. Should not be so problemmatic.

Anyway, always saying it’s not ROON, but the user or user setup is not helpful for those of us struggling with the degraded performance issues of the past six months or more even though we’ve made no changes to any part of our system. I’m happy for you folks who aren’t having problems.

Whatever…just hoping things change for the better on the 27th.

If not, I will still have ROON because of the lifetime license (which was a bargain back in 2019) but I just won’t use it as much. I like vinyl and Qobuz usually works fine without ROON.

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I’m in the same boat. The upside is that it pushed me to use the native Qobuz app and that has been rock solid across all devices and use-cases, even when Roon- or ARC-app struggled at the same point in time.

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Yes, same experience here. I have been using Qobuz daily for a week now. What Qobuz misses is my personal library, and that’s the point for leaving Roon, sadly.

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Perhaps you’ve both missed this post. Looks like the recent changes that Qobuz made to its CDN have caused the Roon problems…

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I feel the pain…and experience it every once in a while. I have been Lifetime since back in 2015. My systems are stable, but I have made changes over the years, and it has been a challenge to know when it’s the system vs the software.

In general, I still love using Roon and always prefer it to anything else that I use. When issues arise, I have fall-back plans, and now that is mostly Qobuz Connect for the systems in the house, but also my DAPs when that is needed.

I do find it strange when a fully hard wired network setup fails to connect, but if I lift up my DAP, it connects almost instantly. I have iPhones and iPads, and they have connection issues sometimes. My main PC hardwired to the network has my wife’s Lifetime account and is used as a Roon Server, and it’s mostly stable, but at times it doesn’t connect and play.

I’ve been on and off Early Release when major issues arise, and have it now on my Nucleus One, and it is currently resolving all of the Qobuz issues that were present over the last 2-3 months.

So, as hard as it is, and it certainly should NOT be the norm, I do suggest waiting for the new release this upcoming Monday and see how that goes for you before you decide to write it off completely.

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A post was split to a new topic: Regret buying subscription

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Could not agree more, love the functionality but the code makes Adobe Creative Cloud all apps look like a memory minimalist in comparison. I let my subscription expire on April 22nd. Applaud the attempts in early access to address this longstanding issue, however improvements discussed in posts shows it still has a long way to go…….

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Ive been running roon since 2016 and never have any real issues (lucky me).

The only time I notice it being slightly glitchy is when I have my tidal account linked. I never have that many tidal albums in my library but looking at the logs when tidal is linked you can see a large rise in activity, gathering/updating/resolving metadata I imagine.

So I would think that people who have thousands of qobuz/tidal albums linked then the system is going to be pretty busy and maybe start glitching.

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As far as I understand it is by design.

The memory usage is so that as large proportion of the database can be held in memory as a performance benefit. The database is a text Key and Value Pair design which can be very slow to interrogate off disc so holding in memory removes the disc read . The disc is read once at the start up to load the db into memory. The bigger the library the more memory occupied.

The use of more conventional relational db with SQL would improve matters but at the cost of a total re-write of the database access code. For example Audirvana used SQLite

Until recently “RAM was cheap”

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I have almost the same configuration and the same issues. Everything was running smoothly but since I added a Qobuz account to my Roon account few months ago, Roon becames slower, unresponsive, etc… That’s a shame because I really appreciate having Qobuz integrated into Roon.