I have 2 music playlists synced to my phone. One is 39 items and it plays fine. The other is 597 items and Plex will not load the playlist in the Android Auto interface. So when I select the playlist it says “getting selection” and shows the spinning icon, but it eventually fails. Note, this happens when connected directly to an Android Auto enabled car and when simply using the Android Auto app on the phone itself. As a workaround, I figured out that if I start playing the playlist through the normal Plex app interface before connecting to the car then it plays fine and when I connect the phone (while the song is still playing) it will boot up Android Auto and continue playing the playlist. Is there a limit to the size of a music playlist for Android Auto or is this a bug?
As a side note, I wish that when I selected a playlist Plex would simply start playing the music. Instead it asks me to select a song first (who cares? it’s just a playlist I want to play at random) and then I have to manually put it in random mode each time.
I think there is definitely a bug here because I had a playlist of 39 songs that worked fine. I added a few more songs and it still worked, but recently I just added enough songs to bring it up to 100 songs and now I can’t play it on Android Auto. I have to use the work-around I described above to listen.
I figured out that I can actually load and play these same playlists just fine when I select my server instead of the playlist that is synced to my phone. So my original attempts were to play the playlist that was synced to my Android phone and that wasn’t working for large playlists. But if instead of selecting “This Device” I select my “Server” then I can find the playlist and it plays just fine. Although I’d still like to be able to play the synced music for a few reasons:
Doesn’t use cell data
Less potential for data interruptions from the server causing a delay in playback
Less clutter when navigating to the playlists (fewer playlists are synced to my phone so there are fewer playlists to browse through when finding the one I want)
I haven’t tested it, but in the settings under advanced/player I see a check box to prefer synced content which i believe defaults to on. Assuming it’s on and working I’d expect the plex client to use your synced media even if you don’t explicitly start it from your local content. Of course it might turn out to be buggy, as with the audio bandwidth limit, but it should work.
Edit: The sync I was running earlier finally finished and I can confirm that playing a playlist that uses music synced to my Android phone is using the local copies rather than going back to my server. It does still seem to be updating the server with playback progress and using it to manage the queue but that’s a relatively trivial amount of data. I didn’t test it in my car but I’d be surprised if running through the Android Auto interface changed the behavior.
No, can’t play large playlists. Anything I do with trying to browse artists, playlists, recently added all crash to a black screen, then back to the home page. Very frustrating I have to disconnect my phone to change the music.
@“-- Admin” said:
No, can’t play large playlists. Anything I do with trying to browse artists, playlists, recently added all crash to a black screen, then back to the home page. Very frustrating I have to disconnect my phone to change the music.
Yeah I have the same symptoms. What phone are you using? I’m using a Moto G4.
