I noticed that when I start Plexamp on my Android device it automatically starts casting to the last target which was connected. This confuses me often and would like it to be optional or behave differently. Here is why:
I am cooking, casting to the kitchen speaker. All is done, I pause the playback.
Next day, my girlfriend is listening to podcasts in the kitchen at breakfast. I start plexamp in bed with the intention to hear music in the bedroom.
Plexamp automatically connects to the kitchen, kicks my girlfriend from the speaker pauses her podcast.
So ideally I think plexamp should start fresh without a casting target set.
Long press the pause button to stop playback and clear the current play queue.
After pausing playback, switch player to “This Device”
Option 2 is my go to as I leave the house. Playback will continue where it left off after connecting to Bluetooth in the car, then when I return home and reconnect Plexamp to the Chromecast audio group playback will again continue where it left off.
Your workarounds often don’t work for me since I am often not sure if I will return to the playback or not. Sometimes I just pause for a call or some other distraction and than I don’t return to the playback, but most of the time I do. Your workarounds mean that I would have to disconnect for every quick pause where I don’t know if I will continue or not.
Also no other app behaves like plexamp so muscle memory just isn’t there for it and won’t built up when often using different casting apps like I do.
A toggle in the settings would be nice to please us both
Yeah I’m not sure why Plexamp treats casting like this - I’m not aware of any other music player that behaves the way Plexamp does when casting. When you disconnect from the casting device, it should just automatically default to “this device”.
Pretty sure most apps resume connection to Chromecast if it’s the selected target and generally it’s the desired behavior.
It does.
Just pausing the playback is not a strong indicator that you don’t want to resume it later. As the followup indicated, there are ways to avoid that, e.g. just change the cast target to This Device or disconnect.
All my other apps (e.g Soundcloud, podcast addict) do not automatically start casting after a hard kill or a device restart. For me this is the desired behaviour.
Just pausing the playback is not a strong indicator that you don’t want to resume it later.
Exactly, that was my point. At that time I don’t know if I want to disconnect or stay connected. Therefore I don’t want to make this decision.
But when I don’t open the app for a day, I diconnect from my W-LAN because I go for a walk or I restart the device, all these are pretty good reasons to assume that when I open the app again I am at a total different listening situation and I don’t want to resume casting to that specific device.
Plexamp doesn’t know these things if it’s suspended/killed. At most it could know how much time had passed, and basing policy on that would be confusing for people who wondered why the app behaved differently and not realizing they’d crossed the threshold.
But you know if the app resumes from the background (onResume()) or is started fresh (onCreate()).
At least it must be somehow possible, because I never stopped a cast from my girlfriend with any other app on appstart.
The only workaround I see is to get out my wifi before I start Plexamp which isn’t really a great experience.
//edit: also there is onDestroy() which is called when your app gets finished.
On a similar (but not identical) note, if a casting target is restarted/rebooted, it should start in a paused state. Maybe this is Plexamp for Raspberry PI specific(?), and RPi maybe isn’t the target used by the OP… Anyhow, I use Plexamp (latest, 3.4) for iPhone and the Plexamp 2.0.0 Beta 2 for RPi.
On iPhone Plexamp start casting music to RPi Plexamp target.
When done press a) pause, then b) disconnect - to “release” the target.
Some time later, the RPi is rebooted, and automatically starts playing music from where we left it after 2)…
Yes, this woke us up in the middle of the night, when we had a brief power outage earlier today . My RPi is connected to a pair of active powered speakers that wakes up automatically when it gets optical input over Toslink…
This can also be tested by just restarting the daemon on the RPi (systemctl restart plexamp), not necessarily rebooting the whole machine.
Workaround is (same as for OPs problem) to select “This device” to take over the playback, instead of disconnecting. Or long pressing the pause button to clear playlist (did not know about that before, thank you!). But that is easily forgotten.
I have another case :
I cast to my speaker at home
I take my car and plug my phone to have android auto and launch a song from my phone
Song is launched on my speaker and not on android auto
Maybe Plexamp can disconnect from previous cast if phone is plugged and launch android auto?
. My RPi is connected to a pair of active powered speakers that wakes up automatically when it gets optical input over Toslink…