Hi all, I’m having some issues with setting up headless Plexamp on my RPI3.
The current status is:
Plexamp installed via script from bash-plexamp-installer/README.md at main · odinb/bash-plexamp-installer · GitHub under my user.
Plexamp starts fine and all. I can select it from my phone and Windows Plexamp applications.
I’ve select “vc4-hdmi: MAI PCM i2s-hifi-0” as my Audio Device which is the one I want since I want the audio out of my HDMI port. Audio through this works fine via ie browser. Here I was having the issue that when picking a song it went to the play screen but was stuck loading as per PlexAmp 4.6.1 headless Rpi4 not playing music stuck on loading player screen - #3 by menacevenice. This appear to have been solved by picking changing the Audio Device to Default Audio and then back again. Now the song will play, but there’s simply no sound coming from the HDMI port.
It’s a fresh install of Raspian OS 64-bit Bullseye and the only thing I’ve done so far is to install Plexamp, although in a few different variants. At first it worked fine to play audio, but the sound was only going through the AUX port and it was very distorted/muffled with a high pitch sound above it - you could barely make out that there was music in the background. So I removed that instance of Plexamp and reinstalled it with the script above but still the same issue (have not tested the AUX port in the exact current state however.
Log from bootup until trying to play a track and track wouldn’t play: plexamplog.txt (78.1 KB)
Log from when there’s no HDMI sound (I believe the logs overlap a bit in the first part, my apologies): plexamplog2.txt (283.9 KB)
Anyone got any other ideas? On why the audio won’t work through HDMI?
Thanks a lot beforehand!
The script can configure HDMI for you, just re-run it and answer yes to the question:
echo "--== Fix HDMI-audio setup ==--"
echo -e "$INFO Configuring HDMI for Audio:"
echo " If you do not have an audio-HAT, you might want to set HDMI as default for audio."
echo " "
echo " WARNING!!! WARNING!!! WARNiNG!!!"
echo " "
echo " Please only run this if you did not run the HiFiBerry HAT setup above,"
echo " and are sure you want to change from Headphones to HDMI for audio out!"
echo
echo -n "Do you want to configure HDMI as default audio-output [y/N]: "
To give us more to look at, please post putput of the command “cat /boot/config.txt” here also.
last time I checked, there was an issue with the “vc4-hdmi” audio device on raspberry pi OS (i think it’s a kernel graphics driver bug, or something like that) …
this device works on the desktop via pulseaudio, but it does not work as an alsa device (which is how you’re trying to use it with Plexamp)
and pulseaudio is not usable when plexamp is run as a system service
you can either continue using the vc4-hdmi audio device + set up plexamp to run as a user service …
or, you can modify the kernel graphics driver/firmware settings to enable an audio device that’s usable with alsa (and plexamp as a system service)
details discussed here …
@odinb1 recently I tried the HDMI config changes included in your installer, at least in my case I still had issues with HDMI audio via alsa … let me know if you have other suggestions
As you probably know, I use my HAT for audio, so I do not use HDMI on a regular basis. If you find something that needs to be changed/added to the script, let me know and I will do that.
thanks, i’m aware of a couple workarounds, not sure if there’s one “best” way to prescribe and implement in your installer, but i’ll share some more info at your github
@odinb1 I forgot to mention that I had used that option in the script as well but unfortunately with no difference.
I had also forgotten the post that @tgp-2 linked to but thankfully that solved the issue for me so many thanks! I will save it for any possible future use
