To start I’d like to say that Roon has been great over the last 6 or 7 years I’ve been using it. It’s a great solution with it’s easy setup, lots of built-in features, and great desktop and phone apps. And when it’s working it’s hard to beat, but it’s also not without its issues.
Before going over my issues with Roon I’d like to give some context of how I have Roon set up, as I know not everyone will experience the problems I have with a dedicated ROCK core or Nucleus. I’ve mainly been running my Roon Server off of my headless M1 Mac Mini and streaming out of my Holo Red to my DAC. Now to the issues…
- Every so often (maybe once every month or two) my Red would suddenly disappear as a playback device option. After restarting my Red and router multiple times when this would happen I eventually figured out my Mac was the issue. To fix this I would have to remote into the Mac and quit out of the Roon Server service, then open the Roon app to start the Roon Server again and wait for the scroll wheel on the top right of the Roon app to finish spinning before quitting out of the app (leaving just the Roon Server service running). It’s not that hard of a process to fix, but the almost consistency for which it would happen kinda got on my nerves over time.
- When hitting “Shuffle All” from the tracks or the albums view my music would shuffle normally until Roon got to a song on certain albums at which point the “shuffle” would play the rest of the songs from that album IN ORDER until after the last track of the album where it would shuffle normally again. So whenever this would happen sometimes I’d have to skip through 10+ songs just to get back to shuffling normally again.
- Speaking of shuffling all of my music, for some reason Roon will shuffle some songs/albums more than others making it not feel truly random if that makes any sense.
- Roon ARC has been iffy at best. Whenever I would use it in my car (my main use case) it would take an excessive amount of time to load anything. And a lot of the time it would just give up and give me a “Poor Connection” error on my CarPlay despite having good reception and Youtube Music would just pull right up every time I’d switch over to it. The weird thing is I remember Roon ARC being much more reliable when it first got released, maybe my phone is just too old for it now (cough cough… still on an iPhone 11 lol).
- Another Roon ARC complaint would be if I skipped more than 2 or 3 tracks in a row by using my car controls the music would just stop and wouldn’t start again until I had a chance to park (destination or gas) so I could completely restart the app and wait for it to load on my phone before attempting to play anything from it again. The only way I could prevent this from happening was by waiting at least 30 seconds into each track before skipping. Couple that with the slow loading issue meant that I also couldn’t skip a song if I had less than 2 bars of signal on my phone or playback would likely come to a halt.
- I could never get the “live scanning” feature working where Roon is supposed to add music to your library as soon as it sees a change in your music folder. Even when I used an external SSD directly attached to the Mac to store my music files (I use a NAS now) this feature would never work and I’d always have to do a “force rescan”. No biggie, but it’s also not a feature if it never works (at least for me) lol.
There’s probably more, but these are the ones that have stuck out to me. As for the final reason, and the main reason why I’ve switched back to LMS is due to a new error.
One day about a week ago I tried playing music in Roon but whenever I’d hit play nothing would work. The weird part is the waveform, album art, info, and everything else would pull up but the song just wouldn’t play. So I did what I usually do when my Red would disappear and tried restarting the Roon Server service on my Mac. But this time I got a new popup error that said the following “Fatal Error could not create required lock file”. Which would continue to pop up after closing it or closing the Roon App, it’d only go away when I quit the Roon Server service.
I went on to try a myriad of solutions listed on the Roon forum trying to fix this (deleting and reinstalling the app, deleting items in the /tmp/ folder for Roon which never appeared in the first place, or giving myself higher privileges to the /tmp/ folder) all in vain. At this point I basically didn’t have Roon anymore, and I don’t have an extra mini PC lying around and definitely didn’t want to buy a new one for this purpose with RAM prices being what they are atm. My only solution at this point was to switch back to LMS.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted on here but in that time I have since finally put money towards a DIY NAS/Homelab Server using TrueNAS (built mid-2024 before the great RAM reckoning so I got 96GB of ECC RAM in that bad boy). This investment has already paid off in spades for me. I now have a modded Minecraft server that my wife and I play on, stream all the movies and shows we have, Tailscale for remote access, photo backups, computer backups, the list goes on. But I figured hey, I have this cool home server now, I’ll just put all my music on there and install Lyrion on it. A few clicks and some setup later and I’m back on LMS. And boy am I impressed by how far LMS has come over the last 3 years. Some changes I’ve noticed include:
- Setup is so much easier than it was, no more fumbling around the default old-school interface to get plugins installed and everything looking nice. When you first start up LMS you’re met with a friendly setup walkthrough that helps you get some of the more popular plugins installed out of the gate. Also the material skin now comes as the default.
- The LyrPlay app has completely replaced iPeng for me now, and it handles Tailscale remote access like a champ. Now when I go in the car I can turn on Tailscale, open LyrPlay and start playing music from a more secure tunnel instead of Roon’s port forwarding solution with ARC.
- There are a lot of plugins available now. I guess it’s been 3 years, but it seems like there’s a plugin for even the most niche of use-cases.
Since switching to Lyrion almost all of the issues I had with Roon have been resolved (I still haven’t had the chance to test Lyrion’s “Live Scanning” implementation). Though it may still be too soon to say for the first Roon issue I listed as it’s only been a week. Will update in a month or two if I get that or a similar issue with LMS.
The LyrPlay app is also a complete 180 in terms of remote reliability compared to Roon ARC now. All I had to do was set my Tailscale MagicDNS URL as my backup server connection on LyrPlay and install a plugin called “Mobile Transcode Rules” to improve transcoding to MP3 for when I’m out and about and care more about reliability than sound quality. Sure I could invest in a DAP, but this works for me atm and I don’t need to update my server and a DAP whenever I get new music. Now I can skip to my hearts content, with only the occasional hiccup where reception is fairly bad and expect that to occur.
All of the updates Lyrion has undergone over the years is starting to make me regret my lifetime Roon License (not to mention the better sound quality I get from LMS when compared to Roon which I talked about here). But I calculated it out that if I used Roon for more than 4 years I’d get my moneys worth for the license. And after 6 almost 7 years I guess I saved money haha. Roon’s lifetime price has gone up since then so now it would take 6 years if you only stick with Roon’s annual pricing plan. But if you’re a little bit tech savvy and okay with a bit less polished user interface then I’d highly recommend using LMS.
Yes there are features that Roon has that LMS doesn’t, like Roon Radio, EQ, and headphone profiles. But I hardly used those features anyways as I mainly listen to my local music now that I’ve stopped all of my music streaming subscriptions (now just Youtube Music for my wife). Also LMS has a Spotify plugin and Roon does not (though Roon should add support now that Spotify has lossless).
All of this to say I made the switch out of necessity but I will more than likely be sticking with LMS from now on, it meets my needs better than Roon and I don’t see myself ever going back to Roon even if I wound up with an extra mini PC to install ROCK on. But of course YMMV, I’m sure people who have a dedicated ROCK PC or a Nucleus have had/continue to have a much better experience than I had with Roon over the years. I’m just happy to be using a solution that works better for me now and it also happens to be FOSS.