FIXED - Plexamp with two different users, Assert true=false, mpd not running, etc

[karloskarlcium]

Server Version#: 1.18
Plexamp: 1.1.0

Wanted to post about a fix for a problem I’ve seen described elsewhere in this forum.

The basic problem is this:

1. Install Plexamp on OSX (Mojave in my case) as user 1
2. Plexamp works for user1
3. Log in as user2
4. Plexamp opens up for user2, you are able to search for music, but you try to click on a song to play it, the player just remains blank and nothing plays.

If you check the difference between these two scenarios, you will note that for user1, mpd runs, whereas for user2, mpd isn’t running. The question is, why?

I figured out at least one possible cause. When mpd is run, it is run with this command line:
/Applications/Plexamp.app/Contents/Resources/helpers/mpd --no-daemon /Applications/Plexamp.app/Contents/Resources/helpers/mpd.conf

If you look at mpd.conf, it looks like this:

audio_output {
  type "soundio"
  name "Output"
  mixer_type "software"
  udp_bind_address "127.0.0.1"
  udp_port "36601"
}

samplerate_converter    "1"
bind_to_address         "127.0.0.1"
port                    "36600"
buffer_before_play      "15%"
audio_buffer_size       "16384"
log_file                "/tmp/mpd.log"

AHA! You’ll notice that mpd is trying to log to /tmp/mpd.log, which is a global file (thus, shared for all). If you look at the permissions on that file, you’ll notice they look like this:

$ ls -l /tmp/mpd.log
rw-r--r--  1 user1  wheel  110355 Oct 26 09:33 /tmp/mpd.log

So, mpd is failing to run for user2 because it can’t write to the log file.
The fix is to do this:

$ chmod a+w /tmp/mpd.log

Then quit and restart all instances of Plexamp.

Also I haven’t tested this fully, but it seems that there are still issues if more than one user is running Plexamp at a time on a computer, so you may have to only one plexamp instance running.

Hopefully this fix is useful for someone. And for the Plex developers, can you please fix this? You should not be logging to /tmp/xxx.log as this causes issues for multiple user scenarios. Rather consider logging to ~/Libraries/Logs/ or something similar.