I have gotten a “Couldn’t start playback” error immediately when trying to play Discovery Radio in Plexamp for about a week now. It may coincide with the last update to the app, but I wasn’t paying close enough attention because I’ve only today had time to really dig into it.
All other radio stations work fine. What’s different about how Discovery Radio kicks off?
It only affects Plexamp; this station plays fine across the main Plex app on several platforms.
I normally use Plexamp on Android, but I downloaded it for Windows during troubleshooting, and it fails there too.
No logs are updated on my Plex server when it fails. I will attach a log snippet from Plexamp’s log, though it doesn’t seem especially interesting: plexampLogSnippet.txt (4.6 KB)
I’ve tried the Plex Dance with my local files (I primarily listen to Tidal and just use local file to fill in gaps in their library), since I found similar failures caused by bunk metadata. No joy.
At this point, I’m running out of ideas of what to look at. Ideas?
Did the above, no change. Is this based on any theory, or just taking stabs in the dark? I’ve been able to reliably play other radio stations or music directly from Tidal without issue, so it doesn’t seem to me like there’s anything indicating an issue with my Tidal account or the integration itself.
Hi @elan I have attached some server logs as this is definitely a continuing problem for me. I would say though that the speed with which the “Couldn’t start playback” is generated (i.e. instantaneous) might suggest, for me at least, that it is a local app issue rather than a server problem. Also discovery radio does work for me on other platforms.
I successfully opened Discovery radio in the web app at 13:57 and subsequently twice failed to open it in Plexamp at 13:58.
Definitely no change yesterday, and issue continues. Similar to what Jibidibo is saying, the failure is pretty much instant. Combined with how it works when I play in the normal Plex app, and how the server logs don’t get updated when the failure happens, it seems like something locally is failing on the client.
Here’s a copy of the Plex Media Server log. I cleared the old logs and rebooted, so this is everything logged from boot. at 9:09, I tried repeatedly to play the Discovery Radio, but only the keep alive messages were logged. No other logs were updated after 9:08 (before I tried playing Discovery Radio), so I didn’t include them.
Thanks for the confirmation Elan. Everyone will be different but I would certainly prefer to discover music that is considered similar to my musical tastes (as defined by my library), so would appreciate this fix/change.
Agreed, though I’d also be okay with Discovery Radio keeping unlimited degrees of separation and ignoring the setting, as long as the setting lets me narrow down the artist radios.
