Mac OS Catalina Disaster With Sonos and Roon

[mwheelerk]

Mac OS Catalina has been a total disaster for me so far as far as music goes.  

 

I have used iTunes (Music) for years as many have.  The first issue is that I lost about 1/4 of my 2800 album covers.  Thankfully I have kept an archive of my album art as I quite frequently like to compare cover versions to get the best quality I can.  However is was a very tedious task of re-adding all those covers. The second issue with Music for me personally is the loss of the Column Browser function with Artwork in the Songs view.  I used this extensively for searching my collection and making metadata edits.  I really miss it.  I also do not like the loss of the Genre category that use to be available along with Artists, Albums and Songs.

 

I have Sonos equipment that I use. Now with Mac OS Catalina my Music Library is no longer available to me.  No matter what I do to create a new path to my library, the same path as used by Music my library won't load.  I can still play my library through Music (iTunes) using Airplay but I have reasons that I use Sonos at times.

 

The same thing holds true for Roon.  I can no longer access my library files for Roon.  Each time I try to set the path I get an error message that access is not authorized.

 

I've reach out to all three companies for support but as of now I don't have any answers to solve my problems especially with Roon and Sonos.  The loss of features in Music I will just have to live with.

 

If anyone is using Mac OS Catalina and Music and also Sonos and/or Roon successfully and could provide any insight your help would be greatly appreciated.

[Ishmael Slapowitz]

Uh oh:

 

We are aware of some issues on macOS Catalina related to file access and security.

We’re hoping to have a fix live soon, but for the moment we are recommending against updating to Catalina for Roon users who run their Core on macOS.

 

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/roon-core-macos-catalina/79920

[wgscott]

If you have a backup of your previous installation prior to the "upgrade," you can revert.

 

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=2ahUKEwj8r4Gt67flAhWaFjQIHd7BBWgQFjAAegQIARAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fosxdaily.com%2F2019%2F06%2F19%2Fhow-downgrade-macos-catalina-beta%2F&usg=AOvVaw0dJlqp8b9NrcDHZAkc7GQs

 

 

 

 

[NOMBEDES]

Told you so.   "Upgrades" are the bane of computer audio.  Get thee to a streamer.  Please never use a computer for music.

 

 

 

[wgscott]

4 hours ago, NOMBEDES said:

Told you so.   "Upgrades" are the bane of computer audio.  Get thee to a streamer.  Please never use a computer for music.

 

Streamer = proprietary computer in an inaccessible black box

[Ralf11]

as Francis Vincent Zappa did not quite say:

 

You could hear the screamin' tweekers
As the streamer reams up the lake
Reamie weenie up to the snake

 

- Latex Solare du Bouef

[bobbmd]

@NOMBEDES I KNEW it too-- will never get rid of El Capitan--to paraphrase Elijah

"one day at sea you'll smell land and there will be no land and on that day... an Apple upgrade will take all but one  with him..."

[Currawong]

It appears that Roon needs to have code added that asks for permission to access external drives the first time it is run.  That is what I guess the devs are working on implementing right now.

[AudioDoctor]

It appears to me to be a permissions problem. It could probably be solved by giving the user full access to all drives. I’m not home to try it right now to see if it works. 

[Ralf11]

anybody know how to kill the obnoxious upgrade annunciator in System Preferences?

[GregWormald]

3 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

anybody know how to kill the obnoxious upgrade annunciator in System Preferences?

Sometimes😁 either an option-click or control-click in the upgrade panel can show an option to ignore an upgrade.

[Miska]

I was happy that Catalina didn't have any implications on me. And I'm also happy that iTunes got split from the monster it was into more logical pieces that are hopefully also less buggy.

 

[Abtr]

6 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

anybody know how to kill the obnoxious upgrade annunciator in System Preferences?

1) Open Terminal (Finder > Applications > Utilities > Terminal)
2) Run: sudo /usr/sbin/softwareupdate --ignore "macOS Catalina"
3) Enter your login password if asked, hit Enter and you should get confirmation that “macOS Catalina” updates will be ignored.

 

When you want to allow the update again, you can run:

sudo /usr/sbin/softwareupdate --reset-ignored

[Ralf11]

Thanks!!

[NOMBEDES]

On 10/25/2019 at 4:15 PM, wgscott said:

 

Streamer = proprietary computer in an inaccessible black box

 

 

Indeed.  But the streamer usually works.  The computer, not so much.

 

Just had a meeting of our audio club.  Our host has everything (music/movies) on his computer.  During our meeting he only had to reboot once.  a triumph!   

 

Computer Audio is fine if you like to tinker or you are a computer scientist.    For the rest of us........

 

[Miska]

1 hour ago, NOMBEDES said:

Just had a meeting of our audio club.  Our host has everything (music/movies) on his computer.  During our meeting he only had to reboot once.  a triumph!   

 

Taking a Bluesound Node2i into use was such a nerve wrecking experience that I've never had with a proper computer. And it still cannot play Amazon Music, although Amazon Music can be played for example on my phone. Go figure...

 

I only reboot my computers when required by software update, which is not frequently.

 

Most streamers are computers running Linux, typically some ancient mangled version. My computers are also running Linux, but up to date one...

 

[botrytis]

Many are running dedicated Linux you mean. They still have the same issues, you just can't do anything about it when they break or have software issues.

 

1 hour ago, Miska said:

 

Taking a Bluesound Node2i into use was such a nerve wrecking experience that I've never had with a proper computer. And it still cannot play Amazon Music, although Amazon Music can be played for example on my phone. Go figure...

 

I only reboot my computers when required by software update, which is not frequently.

 

Most streamers are computers running Linux, typically some ancient mangled version. My computers are also running Linux, but up to date one...

 

 

Many are running very out of date hardware too. I mean Bryston charges 1K for their Raspberry Pi player which has a $40 USD computer in it.

[DeathFugue]

I'm a newbie to both Mac (bought a Macbook Pro a few days ago) and started a Roon trial yesterday. I copied all of my music from an external drive (FAT 32 formatted) to the Mac and Roon reads them just fine. I do have a few missing covers, but it's not a huge deal to replace them. I haven't tried reading from an external drive, and I'm not in any hurry to mess things up!

 

I'm not 100% certain it came with Catalina, but I assume it did, and when I saw a software update, I clicked on it. Since it took about 90 minutes to update, I'm now guessing I had Mojave unless all OS updates that long. If I did have Mojave before, I'm now kicking myself for "updating"!

[Miska]

4 hours ago, botrytis said:

Many are running dedicated Linux you mean. They still have the same issues, you just can't do anything about it when they break or have software issues.

 

Yes, although it is also not as easy to mess it up as regular OS like Windows.

 

For my software, I'm providing similar "firmware" images that run on a regular PC. If it goes broken, you can just reflash it. While of course the software can be also run on a normal Linux distro, so the choice is available.

 

So there are different shades of gray between the extremes. It is not as simple as having two silos; streamers and computers. That is also reason why I hate the term "streamer" because it is quite loosely defined alternative term for computer + software combo.

 

[botrytis]

24 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

Yes, although it is also not as easy to mess it up as regular OS like Windows.

 

For my software, I'm providing similar "firmware" images that run on a regular PC. If it goes broken, you can just reflash it. While of course the software can be also run on a normal Linux distro, so the choice is available.

 

So there are different shades of gray between the extremes. It is not as simple as having two silos; streamers and computers. That is also reason why I hate the term "streamer" because it is quite loosely defined alternative term for computer + software combo.

 

 

I prefer to be able to fix it myself.

[Bob Stern]

6 hours ago, DeathFugue said:

I'm not 100% certain it came with Catalina, but I assume it did, and when I saw a software update, I clicked on it. Since it took about 90 minutes to update, I'm now guessing I had Mojave unless all OS updates that long. If I did have Mojave before, I'm now kicking myself for "updating"!

 

The MacTracker app (free at the Apple App Store) or https://everymac.com/systems/apple/index-apple-specs-applespec.html will tell you the original version of MacOS when your model Mac was introduced.

 

If it is Mojave or older, you can revert to Mojave by downloading the installer:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/macos-mojave/id1398502828

 

You'll have to install Mojave on an empty partition, then use Migration Assistant to copy your apps, data, prefs, etc from your backup of your current Catalina volume.

[kirkmc]

Yet another developer - Roon - who ignored what Apple told them to do regarding file and folder permissions. Just like that DJ software that was making the rounds a couple of weeks ago, attempting to pin the blame on Apple, whereas it was just lazy developers. 

[AnotherSpin]

3 hours ago, kirkmc said:

Yet another developer - Roon - who ignored what Apple told them to do regarding file and folder permissions. Just like that DJ software that was making the rounds a couple of weeks ago, attempting to pin the blame on Apple, whereas it was just lazy developers. 

 

Agree. Catalina works pretty well, if there is a problem (or "disaster" according to OP) it is with several particular software developers, who didn't make necessary changes yet.

[botrytis]

It is just like MS and Win 10. The developers do not listen to MS and we have issues and then blame the OS.

[Miska]

22 hours ago, botrytis said:

It is just like MS and Win 10. The developers do not listen to MS and we have issues and then blame the OS.

 

Win 10 has issues all by its own without doing anything.

 

On one machine it corrupted it's registry all by itself so badly that it didn't load half of the drivers at boot anymore, including keyboard driver. On another one, update caused mouse pointer to get extremely jerky - it moves for a second and then freezes for another second. Needless to say Linux has been working perfectly on both machines.

 

On my development machine, Win10's screensaver timeout stopped working. No matter what time I set there, nothing ever happens. On the same machine, one of the bigger updates failed to install and spending half a day with Microsoft remote support didn't help, they couldn't figure out why and gave up. I reinstalled updated Win10 on the same machine and got updates working again, however, it didn't affect screensaver functionality.

 

Apart from that, one thing that affected me was that update from Win 7 to Win 8 broke support for multithreaded COM objects with WASAPI. And Win10 Creators Update broke third party license key system (for some unknown reason) and I had to replace that component on the fly during product life cycle.

 

On macOS I only remember one bigger issue when Apple changed behavior of drag-and-drop suddenly.