Same issue as this thread which is closed but not resolved. I can’t seem to find how to reopen the issue so here’s a new thread.
Basically it seems under certain situations Plexamp is crossfading tracks even when it’s set not to, which means it’s concurrently playing end of one track and the start of the next at the same time, which is basically unlistenable (whole point of a music app is to listen to music surely).
The old app worked fine so this is an issue on the new app.
What has been done
Installing the testflight version over the appstore version
Played music
Music is crossfading
Setting is set to not crossfade
Music is still crossfading
I’ve seen this so far on macOS, iPad and iPhone
What has worked (for a couple of plays)
on iPhone, resetting settings and trying again
this also seemed to work on Mac but I haven’t tried it for a few days since doing it
What seems to have fixed for a day or so (on iphone)
Removing the app entirely, downloading all the music again (which is a faff when there’s a lot of music on there)
on the iPad build there seems to be a more serious issue as this is happening on a totally clean install, and on tracks which are streamed not just downloads.
I have a log from this, where the app was installed fresh from testflight today, and the replication steps at this stage are:
install the app
sign in to plex
set the theme from dark to light
change the crossfade setting to off
find an album
play the first track
it crossfades into the second ignoring the setting
I’ve also noticed when it’s working the playback timeline is a straightforward bar going across but when it’s not working there’s extra graph detail on it, if that helps
PS: If this doesn’t work feel free to close this thread too. I’ll just use another method of playback rather than helping you test your software
I’ve also just gone back in on the mac (which has no option at all to generate logs - which is somewhat ironic as getting the logs out of ios device is like escaping from alcatraz on a 30cm ruler) and the setting hasn’t persisted there either. Needed a reset of the app settings again.
Something’s clearly up, which is a shame, because the feel of the new version is much improved, and also it’s a lot more responsive.
Hope the logs are useful but honestly this isn’t hard at all to replicate.
On macOS, the logs for Plexamp are available in the usual place (for macOS apps). That is, in the macOS Console app, select Log Reports from the left-side. Plexamp.log will be in the list on the on the top-right.
Thanks for the log. Plexamp isn’t crossfading in it: every track goes into the player with an overlap of 0 ms, so there are never two streams playing at once. What it is doing is gapless, which is why tracks that segue run straight into each other without a pause.
That capture was an album though, and albums always play gaplessly whatever Sweet Fades is set to, so it doesn’t tell us anything about the playlist case or the setting. Can you catch it happening on the playlist and submit another?
btw, on the point of “user-friendliness”, and I would consider myself to be a relatively advanced user, the whole log capturing thing is particularly unintuitive.
I notice that in addition to the Mac app not having an in-app way to get the logs (it could simply link to what the previous poster suggested, or there could be a FAQ for it) the Windows app also doesn’t have a similar option (so where do you get these?) and seriously the mechanics of what happens after you press the log button on a mobile device isn’t good either. For a start if you have more than one log file it’s a zip, which an iphone can’t open without another app. And the options (which I get are triggered by iOS not the app) often don’t work or aren’t really suitable - I had to imessage the zip file to myself, which you can then only retrieve on a mac signed into the same apple id, so you can’t then easily get that onto something like a windows machine (and probably a lot of people who have iphones don’t have macs). Then you have to spend time going through the logs to obfuscate anything which isn’t necessary (track names, your IP address etc) and that takes time as well. Overall it took me about 40 minutes from initially dumping that log (which was a few minutes work on the device) in plexamp to having it ready to post (and then having to post a new thread)… Most people will be put off by this, so you won’t get a full picture of any issues. And it’s not as though this is hard to replicate…
Just saying to be helpful as opposed to having a go, we are the users of the software (in this case, helping with a pre-release version) and the user/customer experience is important
@elan here’s a log with the same troubleshooting steps (from a fresh install of the app again) as before only playing two tracks together from a playlist, which overlapped rather than playing gapless there either.
It seems to me that the gapless playback is actually cutting the start/end of the tracks so it behaves like a crossfade, rather than running the first track to the end of the stream and then starting the new one, so the playbacks are overlapping for a second or two.
If this is by design it should really be a user setting, as it’s unlistenable when tracks run the full length.
Found it, and you were right. It is overlapping, and it behaves like a crossfade because it is one: 2.9 seconds in the playlist log, 7.6 in the album one.
Sweet Fades being off does stop us asking for a crossfade when the track is queued. But Plexamp analyses tracks on the device now when your server hasn’t, and when that analysis finishes mid-track it recomputes the fade and schedules it without checking the setting. So it only bites the first time you play something unanalysed, which is why a fresh install reproduces it every time and why it seemed to come and go.
I suppose the additional question is why the server hasn’t analysed tracks which have been on it for a while - in this case, a few years.
I suppose also
if it was waiting to analyse a track before playing it, that would make the player more laggy
then if it does it without checking the setting, logic wise that’s the wrong way round - it’s wasting CPU time if it’s trying to set up a crossfade (of any kind) without knowing first that it’s set to do so - in other words, it doesn’t need to bother with any of that if the user just wants to play the track
If the player is analysing a track because the server hasn’t, might it work at some point to feed that back?
If the first point is just enabling sonic analysis in the library settings (which I don’t have on) then might it be more pertinent for someone at plex to include more info as to what that involves, as at the moment the description is very vague - “Sonic Analysis - Analyze tracks for sonic features.”. No blue hedgehogs
