After some trial and error, I have PlexAmp installed and running on a new Raspberry Pi 5. I ended up following OdinB’s post on HowToHiFi-dot-com(“How To Create a Headless Plexamp Player Using OdinB’s Plexamp Installer Script”).
Things look good until I try to play a track. What I am finding is that the songs won’t actually play. The Now Playing screen shows the song, but there’s no timeline / progress indicator at the bottom. PlexAmp also registers them amongst the recently-played section.
I assume the solution lies somewhere in the Playback settings, where I’m experimenting, but no success as yet. I’ve got the RPi connected to a DAC via HDMI, outputting on HDMI-0. That’s the output I’ve selected in RasPlex’s device setting (“vc4-hdmi-0: MAI PCM i2s-hifi-0”).
Collect and provide Plexamp logs from the current configuration after attempting playback.
Connect speakers or a headset to the 3.5mm port on the Pi and select the bcm headset device as the playback device; see if it works properly in that configuration. (Just as a troubleshooting step.)
Before doing anything else though, ensure you have a Player connected in the Players dialog by clicking the player selection icon at the top-right of the web UI (if you’re using that):
Weird things can happen if you don’t have one connected and you attempt playback.
I will post logs once I figure out how to export those
No 3.5mm port on the RPi 5. Boo.
I have been sure to de-select + re-select the player (as well as every other facet of the configuration). No luck.
I realized that my DAC has a USB input, so I tried that, making sure to enable it via raspi-config + select it as the output device in PlexAmp. I figured that would work, as the DAC does show up as an output device in PlexAmp, but no luck. Things seem to get a bit farther, with the selected song appearing on the Now Playing screen with a time / progress indicator (which hadn’t appeared before), but it’s not actually playing.
Also what is your caching? I have experienced that with high res files like 24bit/96K sometimes I couldn’t get any sound or I would get like 5 seconds and then it would pause/hang for a few seconds. I found that changing the cache size helped.
Not saying this will fix it, but might be worth a shot.
Respectfully, you can’t expect folks to come track you down for answers to their requests.
I requested Plexamp logs in my initial reply to you. Unless they were added and subsequently removed, they were never provided.
Ryuzaki_2 posed some questions as well to which, as far as I can see, no answers were provided.
Also, didn’t you subsequently post in another thread that you ultimately got playback to work and moved on to a different problem?
I saw that you created another new thread regarding Plexamp headless and a USB DAC. I didn’t reply there because I don’t have any specific experience with the DAC. You’ll find that that’s sometimes the case; not every third-party accessory will have been tested for compatibility and folks may or may not have experience with them.
I need to figure out how to get in contact with someone that knows what they’re talking about - I’ve spent hours going around in circles, and it is impossible to figure out where to even begin to explain what is wrong. Plexamp is poorly documented and supported, I’m not sure how anyone expects an end user to figure out how to use anything relating to it.
What do you have experience with? It seems to me the DAC shouldn’t be relevant, if you can get the DAC to work with the OS. I can get the DAC to work with the OS, I can’t get plexamp to output audio properly to the OS or use my OS’s configuration with the DAC. I have no idea what the devs were thinking or intending as far as how plexamp outputs sound to the OS - it seems that you can configure your optiosn in the OS as much as you want, but as far as plexamp is concerned, the world is 44.1 kHz 2 channel - which it very much is not! However - I’ve proven that in one specific instance, plexamp will properly output 5.1, when a specific configuration is done for hdmi with a Pi3 - but that doesn’t help me at all when I need to get it to output with my configuration on my Pi5 using a DAC. The DAC works fine, the Pi works fine, plexamp doesn’t.
I’m sorry, but I can’t help you. If I felt like I could have been of assistance with your current issue(s) I would have replied in the relevant thread(s). I do however wish you luck.
