Roon ARC

Absolutely love this app. Have been waiting for an app to do this exact thing, streaming audio to my iPhone from my music server at home when I’m out of the house. I now have my own streaming service, serving just the music I like. Immaculate. Maybe a bug(?): when music is interrupted, if I get a notification or the like, it sometimes causes some noise and is not as smooth fading in and out, as when using Apple Music. Only feature I could wish for, is the option to transcode larger audio files to AAC, when downloading music for offline use. I have a large library of Hi-Res and DSD files, and would use up all my storage if I wanted to transfer those to my phone. Seeing as Roon ARC does on-the-fly transcoding for streaming, it should be possible. At least in my non-developer mind 😄

This app has been unusable for over a year. Each new release brings hope that the developers have finally fixed all the issues, but one minute into playing a song all hopes are dashed. The app locks up becoming unresponsive. It crashes with a full app closure within a minute into a song. I’ve never seen an apple app crash like this. It’s completely unusable and has been for over a year. These problems occur with both streamed and downloaded offline content so it’s not a connection or server issue — it’s the app playback coding. The developers are either incompetent or simply don’t care. In any case, don’t subscribe to Roon if the lure of what the Arc app promises is important to you.

I have music I own that I’d like to take with me on my phone occasionally. Theoretically, ARC should do that, but it’s too flaky to be useable. Whenever I go to use it, usually it’s not ready to go. I have to spend 10-15 minutes getting it in working order. Usually, it gets stuck and the only recourse is to reinstall, which means I have to spend the next several days downloading because it cannot download things in large batches without getting stuck, which sometimes also requires re-installing. At least, that’s what happened last time I had to re-install. I’ve queued up my library for download, maybe it’ll work this time.

Almost instantly. Crashed my Sonic Transporter while “loading library for the first time”. Back to PlexAmp

Downloading tracks is a nightmare. If my screen goes to sleep while an album is downloading, downloading completely stops, and I have to force quit the app and re-open it to get downloads to resume. Why can’t downloads continue while the screen is off. And why won’t downloads resume after the screen is reawakened? And how freaking hard could it be to expand the interface to properly fill an iPad screen?

How come we still don’t have an iPad version. I use it every night when I go to bed and that small screen is annoying.

Roon is great when it works. That’s equally true for Roon Arc. There’s no good reason why it can’t work behind CGNAT. At the *very* least it should work when the devices have Tailscale or another method of NAT traversal, but really it should handle NAT traversal itself. But even without CGNAT the connection can be unreliable. Once those issues are addressed, please consider adding an Apple Watch app. I’d love to give up my Apple Music subscription and switch to Roon for all my music listening, but that isn’t happening without a Watch app. Otherwise, the app is a joy to use on iPhone, and like I said— everything’s great when it works! Even with the aforementioned issues, I’m glad I bought a lifetime subscription for ~$700.

It seems I spend more time troubleshooting ARC instead of just listening. I have major problems over WiFi, and strangely things seem more reliable over mobile networks. I’m also unable to get it to connect on my home network even though Roon Remote works just fine.

I can’t get it to work since it was released. I am an IT professional and have correctly configured my router and core. ARC never connects to my core.

From the first day it is very unstable, the application crashes all the time, in each update nothing changes, I have the lifetime membership for which I paid 700 dollars just for nothing. I switched back to plexamp because it always works flawlessly!