This is an issue I’ve observed since my iPhone updated to iOS 15 and may simply be an OS issue I have to wait to see patched, but I figured it couldn’t help to throw something out on the forums and see what I got back.
Basically, I created a playlist (“Phone,” imaginatively enough) of albums I wanted downloaded to my device since Sync is no longer supported. A fair portion of the contents of that playlist will download without issue. However, even after deleting and restarting the download with the phone’s auto-lock disabled and Plex running in the foreground, I see that it’s the same number (2311) of items that error out.
Add to the mystery, they’re all by artists whose pages were populated by the automated metadata agents. I eventually got tired of the anomalies those agents created in my music library and turned them off, but some artist “pages” were generated from them along the line. The trick is, I can’t figure out how this would make a difference. Short of having more tags per album than I would normally use, nothing appears to be improperly formatted or corrupted.
I tried to pick through the logs from my iOS device, but wasn’t able to find any obvious errors or warnings in all that text.
If anyone else has run into this or has any suggestions, I’m all ears. Considering the playlist partially downloads and is 11 days long, it’s hardly the end of the world, but I would like to resolve this sooner rather than later.
This might be a long shot… but with 1000+ songs you’ll have quite a sizable download. Does your iPhone still have sufficient space or could it stop downloading more items because it’s running out of space (or space allocated to download media to Plex)?
Fair question, but storage shouldn’t be an issue here. I’ve got approx. 57 GB allocated for Plex and it’s only using 38.5 GB as of the moment and the amount of free space the app is reporting seems correct.
Something I forgot to mention in my initial post: the app tends to freeze and even crash out because of these download errors. If I had to guess, it keeps trying to check what’s queued against what’s on the server and it’s as if all bandwidth gets allocated to that check - whether on mobile data or Wi-fi, it behaves the same.
Here’s the most recent set of logs from the device. The phone was cycling between attempting/failing the files in question when I generated this. It’s been doing that all evening.
I’m guessing not, but has there been any feedback from those logs?
Barring that, any ideas I can try to get around these glitches?
For an added bit of info, I think we can eliminate the source of metadata as the culprit. I took one of the problem artists, deleted the artist totally from my server and then re-added the files, which resulted in a brand new artist profile. After adding albums back to the playlist I’m downloading to my phone, they’re still failing to pull down.
A bit counter-productive, but at least it’s another data point.
As an aside, I’ve had an intermittent issue which may or may not be connected and which has only been present since the iOS 15 upgrade. Every once in a while, power cycling the phone will reset the Plex app to the extent that not only do I need to log in as if for the first time, but it also has shed ANY user settings that were in place before. Could just be some iOS junk that has no bearing here, but thought I’d mention it just in case.
Ok, not sure if this is in any way useful, but I’ve got one other data point.
After having the app itself freeze repeatedly and crash during playback (presumably because of the Download function having a fit), I just cleared out the Download queue. The app was still unstable as hell, but at least it was responsive before shutting itself down five seconds into a playback.
I read a few other threads on here about iOS and Downloads issues and saw some people attempting to only download a portion of what they were after. I set one album to download.
It consistently failed when part of the playlist I use to keep my queue simple. This time, the process started and jumped to “Error Downloading 10 Files” damn near instantaneously. The problem is nothing, if not consistent.
I’m guessing the app is trying to start hundreds of downloads at once when it starts encountering friction. I’d assume the problem was the size of the playlist I’m attempting to download, but the app DOES successfully download about 1400 files which aren’t in any particular order, alphabetically or otherwise and it still fails when it’s just 10 of the problem files in isolation.
