 This week Roon released version 2.0 which makes it possible to use your Roon Music catalogue on the move using your iOS or Android smartphone. A feature that was requested by many Roon users. Mobile use of your Roon catalogue and music from Tidal and or Kubus, if you are subscribed to these streaming services, is totally new and needs the installation of a free Roon Arc app on Android or iOS. This app is only for use away from home. At home you use the normal Roon app on your smartphone tablet or computer to control playback from your Roon server. If your internet router is properly UPMP compatible, Roon will automatically set port forwarding for you. This is necessary to give Arc on your smartphone access through your router to the Roon Core. If Roon can't set the port forwarding, it shows a link to the help page with instructions. My brand new modem router, my provider Zigo sent me a month ago, needed the UPMP function switched off and back on again to function well. When you start the app on your phone for the first time, you are asked for your Roon username and password, after which the recent activity screen is shown. These include the activities by that user at home. After that you need to select the user, after which the recent activity screen is shown. These include the activities by that user at home. So you can pick up listening the album you had playing at home. Below it new releases that Roon think that are interesting to you, your daily mixes, etc. Along the bottom of the screen you see icons for Home, Search and Catalog. When you select Search, the looking glass, recent searches you did at home or in Arc are shown and can be selected. I search for Annika van Giersbergen and when I tap that search, Annika will appear and you see her albums. By selecting the catalog icon, you can browse on albums, artists, tracks, composers, compositions and playlists, just as with Roon at home. They can be sorted several ways. With albums it is artist, most played, date added, release date and album title. At playlists you can choose the playlist of other users on your system and sort on track count, length or date modified. You can also see what you have downloaded for use away from home without the data penalty on your cell phone subscription. You can play music from Tidal and Cobus but not downloaded to the Arc app. If you want to do that, you should use the Tidal or Cobus app. These two apps can be used fully with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, something Roon Arc can't yet. But you can start playback in Arc on your smartphone, then Apple CarPlay does receive the audio and you can even pause and skip tracks on your car's entertainment system using the Apple CarPlay interface. I don't have Android so I couldn't try Android Auto. I presume a full Apple CarPlay and Android Auto implementation will follow soon since in many countries it is forbidden to operate a phone while driving, as where it is not forbidden to operate your car's entertainment system. Arc can play music in full resolution on your phone, provided sufficient bandwidth and your phone supports higher sampling rates. If you are at work and can use your boss's wifi, Arc will be sent the full audio quality, for instance 192 kHz 24 bit if your file has those specs. The limits are 768 kHz 24 bits and DSD 256 over DOP. DSD can also be converted to PCM if your phone doesn't do DSD. MQA tracks are not unfolded and thus at best send one FS files 44.1 or 48 kW 16 bit. If less bandwidth is available or budget restricted, you can choose 44.1 and 48 kW 16 bit for all tracks. So full CD quality. If even less bandwidth is available, which can be the case with 4G and 3G cell services, your own music is sent to your phone using 256 kbps opus which is a better lossy compression codec, about comparable with AAC256. Tidal tracks will be 320 kbps AAC and Cobus track 320 kbps MP3. When almost no bandwidth or data budget is available, Arc will be sent 96 kbps opus, Tidal tracks 96 kbps AAC and Cobus 320 kbps MP3. Using Arc on Android phones means there is no BitPerfect reproduction since BitPerfect playback is not facilitated by Android OS that converts all audio to 48 kHz. Although there is a way to circumvent the Android Auto conversion, Arc does not do that. Perhaps a later version. All of Roon Arc is a very much wanted update. The domestic Roon system has undergone some changes as well. Mac users now can enjoy native binaries for macOS devices running on Apple Silicon. Furthermore there is now a native implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework that really speeds up Roon on Macs and makes it as fast as Linux and Windows versions according to Roonlabs. There are also changes that some might not like. First the Roon Core now needs an active internet connection all the time to check your subscription. Version 1.8 only needed an internet access every 30 days. Furthermore version 2 is only supported on 64 bit systems with Windows 10 or 11, the latest Ubuntu or Arch Linux distros and macOS version 10.15 or higher. People that want to keep using their older hardware or OS are advised to keep using version 1.8. A warning for those that want to do that and use a tablet set to auto update. If your tablet auto updates to version 2.0 it will no longer work with version 1.8 so it is recommended to switch off auto update. My Roon Core runs inside Grim Audio Mu1 digital player on an Intel Noc i3 board with 8 gigabytes of RAM. I use second generation iPad Pro or a 3.3 GHz i5 iMac 4 remotes. The i3 is the minimum hardware requirement for the Roon Core and having a very large catalog of 170.000 tracks made version 1.8 less responsive than I would have liked. My RoonRock on an i7 Noc worked fast while my son uses an i5 Noc with about the same size catalog and that worked fine too. The Grim Audio Mu1 sounds so much better than what preceded it that I chose a slightly slower response as a compromise. By the way if you own say 2 to 3000 CDs the i3 is more than sufficient, even for Roon 1.8. Now here comes the good news, version 2 is far more responsive especially on the iPad. There always have been complaints about Roon remote on an iPad, although I could work fine with it but it is now so fluid, especially when browsing my library. Only the search function still is not perfect. I got several error messages saying it can't connect to Roon Search. No idea why but that's something that might need a bug fixed. The Roon community always gets loads of comments after a software update. One of the reasons might be that Roon Labs didn't restrict the use of hardware and operating system. Buy a Roon Nucleus and you know you get a very reliable RoonServe. Buy a supported Intel Noc and install RoonRock on it and you can already encounter things that need some understanding of computer hardware and software. Try installing Roon Server on any computer with inspects and you might end up with a fine Roon Server or you might encounter one or more problems. Perhaps also because you also want to run other demanding software that might interfere with Roon. And yes there might also be some bugs in Roon that need fixing. But the Roon Search problem I mentioned is that specific for the NUC i3 in my player or does it occur on some or all computers Roon Core runs on. And do you know complex powerful software that never has bugs? Usually I work around it, for instance if I want to find an artist I don't use the looking glass but go to the artist pane and type the name there. Unless I find software that works better for me. I hardly ever complain to the software makers. There are enough others that do that. And as said, if I find a better alternative, I switch. I have to write several bit perfect music players and have used iTunes and J River for quite some time. I switched to Roon six years ago and never looked back. Just saying. Version 2 was only out for two days when I made this video. I have tested it several hours and used ARC for two hours without real problems, apart from the switching off and back on of the UPnP function in the router. I love it, but I'm also sure there will be things I have not discovered yet. If you have a problem using ARC, it's most certainly due to an old router you use slash are forced to use by your provider. About the sound quality, I can only say that in my setup 1a the sound quality is extremely high, so Roon is sending over a perfect digital signal. There are those that hear differences between the several versions of Roon. I don't. Some say that version 1.7 sounds better than 1.8 and some of you might laugh about that. I take those comments serious. But the only conclusion I can think of is that some hardware works better with version 1.7 and less with version 1.8. There can be all kinds of reasons for that, mostly about the analog properties of the digital signal. For a digital signal is nothing more or nothing less than an analog square wave that is modulated in a way it can hold digital information. Then about ARC. I don't like headphones nor in-ears, but I have used ARC in my car over Apple CarPlay as described earlier. It works fine with from time to time a slight lag in the user interface. Judging sound quality in a car is only possible up to a certain level and never comparable to high quality in-ears, so I reframe for any judgment in that field. I find it great that I know can play my music using my playlist in the car and hope Apple CarPlay will follow soon. One of the fine things of Roon is the volume leveling which is great in the car. Which brings us to the end of this video. I love to see your comments, but please be decent. Then I promise you to get another video out next Friday at 5 p.m. Central European Time. If you don't want to miss that, subscribe to my channel or follow me on the social media so you will be informed when new videos are out. Help me reach even more people by giving this video a thumb up or a link to this video on the social media. It is much appreciated. Many thanks to those viewers that support this channel financially. It keeps me independent and lets me improve the channel further. If that makes you feel like supporting my work too, the links are in the comments below this video on YouTube. I am Hans Beekhuyzen, thank you for watching and see you in the next show or on theHBproject.com. And whatever you do, enjoy the music.