Vanstinator, still having this issue. I believe that pawn described it best. It does complete songs on the Echo Dot or any of the other Echo’s, but it quits after one or two complete songs. The only changes that I can think of would be related to Plex updates, Windows updates, or Echo updates. Otherwise, I have not been tinkering with any other software, features, etc.
My system has been working fairly well for a very long stretch, this playback stoppage has happened in the past, but it resolved itself (as far as I can tell…I don’t think I did anything to resolve the issues, but the problem went away.)
I’m here, likemany others, because the Alexa skill isn’t working properly. It played 2 songs, then stopped and now contantly claims “Your plex server does not appear to be online, would you like to use a different server”. of course there is noting wrong this end, tried rebooting etc etc. Is this likely to be fixed ever, or shoudl I add it to the ever growing list of stuff that doesnt work on plex? Getting pretty sick of it TBH.
This is exactly what I have been experiencing. Sucks that it’s happening but so glad it’s not just me. Usually when the playback stops I tell Alexa “Next” and playback continues. This works about 70% of the time. BTW, my server is on Nvidia Shield. Fingers crossed that they fix this ASAP.
I discovered the problem I was having and perhaps could be the same as others. I had recently created playlists in order to play music by genre since there are no voice commands to play by genre. I added entire albums to these playlists. Some of them had .flac files as well as .wma. I would tell Alexa to shuffle these playlists and this is when I ran into the stop playing after xx songs or even not playing to start. I don’t know about the .wma’s but I created a test playlist with only .flac files. Alexa said “shuffling the playlist test” but nothing was played. I converted all my .flac and .wma to .mp3 and haven’t had a problem since. This would explain why a few songs would play and then stop and my saying Next worked sometimes. Also, if she happened to pick a .flac as the first song to play I would hear nothing. Perhaps the transcoding process screws her up?
Recently (in the past few months) I’ve been having a minor issue with my Echo where I have to ask twice in order to start playing media from my Plex server. After the first request it says “I’m having trouble accessing your Plex skill,” but when I ask a second time immediately after there’s no problem. To my untrained eye it seems like maybe the Echo isn’t waiting long enough for the drives to spin up and files to be fetched before quitting? This wasn’t always a problem, but I don’t know if there was a change in the Echo or Plex skill that caused it or if some change on my server slowed things down a tad to cause the problem. Any insight? Thanks.
We pushed a new release this morning to our skill servers. In a nutshell we’re using some new heuristics available in recent Plex Media Server builds as well as a few other tricks to be much more intelligent about how we’re streaming from a media server. The end result should be fewer cases of playback ending prematurely between songs and fewer cases of Echo devices failing to play anything at all.
For almost a month now my Plex and Alexa have been working with 0 issues since I changed all my .flacs to .mp3’s. That is until a few days ago. All of a sudden playlists that would play 8-10 hours non stop are now dropping off and just quit playing after any given amount of tracks. Same with just an album I was playing - after 1 track it just stopped. I played it again and it played it ok so it isn’t a file issue. I’ve rebooted my Sheild, disabled./enabled skill and rebooted the router that handles my wi-fi. Going to try rebooting my main router later and see if that does anything. Very frustrating knowing that devices (Alexa for one) nowadays are being updated in the background without us knowing and then having to wonder if it was one of those that messed everything up.
I see in my server log the following error multiple times at the point the last track either played or tried to play -
ERROR - unable to find client profile for device; platform=Alexa, platform version=, device=Alexa
I have been having this issue since early December when i setup 2 echo inputs. As you stated “playback abruptly ending between songs” I have been unable to solve the issue.
I’m new to having a Plex server so I don’t yet have much data, but I have been experiencing a similar issue to what has been described previously-- namely that the Alexa skill only occasionally would play music and that when it did play it would often only play one song. For me the Alexa skill would work maybe 1 out of 5 times (the Plex app on my firestick works 100% of the time but that should only need the local network). My internet service has always had a few odd “hiccups” that would occur intermittently (Voice over IP calls getting a sudden burst of static, , huge “mood swings” in download and upload speeds as measured by sequential speedtests, odd delays when pulling up webpages, etc). Yesterday I upgraded my cable modem. So far (just two days) my experience with the Plex Alexa skill has been trouble free. I’m hypothesizing that my problems were related to issues surrounding the upstream direction of communication (even though my tier of service should have far more bandwidth in both directions than I need for a streaming service). It is, of course, too early to know if this is anything but a coincidence, but I thought I’d share my experiences
I was asking Alexa to open Plex. It would say my Plex server is online, but not responding. I would have to ask 2-3 times before I would finally get “Welcome to Plex…” My Plex server is a Synology 918 NAS and I had the drives hibernating. I shut off hibernation and now Alexa almost immediately says “Welcome to Plex”.
When Plex opens on Alexa, I almost always tell it to play some music. 5/10 times Alexa just goes silent after that. When it doesn’t go silent, it will say “Playing library radio”. 7/10 times nothing plays after this.
When Plex finally does play a song on Alexa, it only plays one song and then stops. Sometimes it will play 2-3 songs, but now it is almost consistently one and done.
These issues really did not exist about 9-12 months ago and have only been getting worse. Each time I update my Plex server (which is almost as soon as a new one comes out), this seems to be less and less responsive and more and more annoying. When will this be fixed? Plex runs great on everything else…
Anyone know where to look for logs of what is happening?
Generally I find that I can ask Alexa to ask Plex to play some music, she’ll take a second or two to respond with “Playing library radio” and then it takes anywhere from 5 -20 seconds for music to start, but it does usually start and on a multiroom group too (using the preferred speaker setting). Very occasionally it will stop after one or two songs but most of the time it’s fine. My collection is MP3.
So any Plex/Alexa logs available to see if there’s a cause of the delay and the stopping?
Plex for Alexa is very buggy. I’ve been waiting for a year for it to get some attention from the devs but so far no luck. Video playback using Alexa isn’t any better.
I have 5 individual echo devices. I cannot get Plex to play on another device. Alexa generally will let me say “Alexa, play music on “Home Audio””, where “home audio” is the name of an alexa device connected to my home audio system. Amazon music, pandora, etc. services all work with “play whatever on wherever”. But if I tell one device to “ask plex” to play on another device, it’s basically a giant middle finger from plex and nothing happens.
OMG. and I thought it was just me. I got an Amazon Echo Link today from the big Prime Day sale. The sound is much better through my speaker system… but getting music to play from one echo device to another to the link is beyond frustrating.
I was able to get it to do something directly from the Alexa app (somehow), but it’s very hit or miss. The only way I was able to work was creating a speaker group between an echo dot and the new link. Go to the DOT (as in, press the button) issue the command and it works. Not through any app, not from another echo device.
Oh how I wish “Alexa, tell plex play album Violator by Depeche Mode on Living Room Link” would work.
Effing A… But alas. Also - in a browser window with Plex, or from the Plex app, why TF can’t I cast music to one of my alexa devices? I mean, the “ability” is advertised right on the PLEX home page… FFS.
