[Android Auto] A bug and a feature request around resuming play when reconnecting

Plex Players Mobile Devices
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Two rather annoying issues I’ve noticed after purchasing a new car this past week and playing around with Plex on Android Auto:

  1. BUG:

Playback does resume when reconnecting your phone, but it does not display “currently playing” anywhere. This is a problem because if you paused your track before disconnecting last, you lose your progress and cannot recover it. You also can’t re-enter that playlist without causing it to skip back to the first track (more on that in part 2…).

If I click the “Seek” button on my console to advance to the next track, then there is a little mixer bar icon on the right hand side indicating that there is something being played; clicking that brings me back into the player interface as expected.

Basically, that icon/button should display any time a track is playing or paused, but it seems to not be triggered on reconnecting a device. It will only appear after hitting a control on your car to advance to another track.

(Related: There is also no slider for selecting a spot in the track, which makes it really annoying to recover your spot when it is lost due to this bug, especially relevant on larger audiobooks and such)

  1. FEATURE REQUEST (though I’d argue also kind of a bug…):

Whenever you select a playlist, it will just automatically play the first track in the list, even if you were in the middle of actively playing that playlist. There is no way to select that you want to shuffle it, or no global setting to do that by default.

I’d really rather clicking a playlist bring me to the track list so then I can either select the track I want to start with, or, the much more use case, press a “shuffle” button and launch the playlist in shuffle mode (similar to the option you get if you open the menu on a playlist in the desktop interface).

Or, if that’s too many actions for this system, can there be a shuffle button on the row in the list of playlists so if you press that it auto-shuffles instead of starting with the first track?

Basically, anything so I don’t have to: launch the playlist → open the menu → select the shuffle icon → advance the track to get to a random one. I’m really going to start hating the track that happens to be the first one added otherwise.

Server Version#: 1.27.2.1599-7689068b
Player Version#: 8.11.0.22186 (a1b8a7fb)

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For now it appears these bugs are not present in Plexamp, it just sometimes pauses when starting up and resuming a track (but at least that’s resolved by just tapping the play button, mildly annoying but tolerable).

Plexamp also behaves more logically when selecting a playlist (opens it so you can choose to shuffle or select a track). It also lets you browse by artist and stuff, which is bizarre that Plex doesn’t let you do.

But these are still issues with the main Plex app that should be resolved.

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