Roon ARC

A long time Roon user, I held back for years before trying ARC on the go - it didn’t work without tinkering with my router settings, and if I already have a Tidal subscription, why not use that on the go. But I often missed my playlists from home, as well as music that I have on the server but not available on Tidal. Finally I read about Tailscale and gave it a try. Setting up Tailscale was very easy, but I still had to add some firewall rules and restart the Roon server before it worked. However, since I started using it, I’ve been very pleased with the whole thing. It’s a surprisingly good player app, has offline downloads for local content, and works actually more stable and smooth than the Tidal app. The only thing I don’t like is that tapping a song plays it, instead of bringing up the context menu (play next, queue). I don’t want my music interrupted and my queue gone because I hit a song title instead of the little ellipsis button.

I previously tried roon over a year ago and loved it except I could only listen at home and I go out often which was a problem. When I heard about roon arc I immediately reactivated a 15 day trial and it was good enough for me to finally convert. It still isn’t perfect, I occasionally get poor connection warnings when my connection is fine, multiple times a week the app has auto signed out of my account although it doesn’t always happen. And on top of that the downloads sometimes show a download symbol wheel when nothing is downloading. I also think the interface needs a bit of work but is simple and easy to use as is. Most of the time I’ve managed to get it to work just fine for my daily commute and has been a suitable replacement for plexamp with much better stability. I hope development continues and bugs are fixed over time because I will continue to use this app daily.

Tried out of home connection once with the first software release, and was unable to connect, despite my having a UPnP router and it showing that it was reachable. Haven’t tried it with the second release, will do so and report back. There is no dedicated iPad app, so you’re stuck with the low-res limited window view using the iPhone application on your tablet. Perhaps another iPadOS version will be forthcoming but for now this is really an iPhone based app. I wouldn’t bother with this unless you use Qobuz, because Roon didn’t pursue the MQA first unfold for Tidal and you’ll be stuck with 48khz rendering maximum, even if you use an external DAC attached to your phone (there’s no MQA passthrough). 😡