Music Collection of Albums or Artists won't play, but Collection of Songs will

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

Server Version#: 1.24.1.4931 windows
Player Version#: 4.59.2 web player

I just started using collections instead of play lists 3 weeks ago. I have a collection of 200+ songs that plays fine . I have several Collections of Albums from different genre… so if i try and play my “Alternative” collection or “Hip Hop” collection i get error “Playback Error: An Error occurred loading items to play”… these collections had no problem like 2 weeks ago i haven’t played from them since then, but i have updated Plex Server for Windows i think 1 or 2 times here recently so i have to blame that as the only change.

Is Plex telling me that is just can’t play a Collection that is made up of Albums but only Songs?? because i can go into those 2 collections or others i just mentioned , then go to any album in the collection and play songs just fine, but i can’t play the Collection and of course shuffle it which is the final goal… again my Collection of just “songs” works perfectly fine.

what gives here ? is this a bug ? this worked a couple of weeks ago when i first moved to using Collections, it’s just i’ve been ONLY using the Collection of 200+ songs, but i know i was able to play the collection of Albums previously. Also same for a Collection of Artists i get the same error.

i tried a repair following these steps Repair a Corrupt Database 1.22.0 and earlier | Plex Support
no good… i tried all my current backup .db files that plex had for 3 previous backups, still same issue

I even uninstalled plex for windows, renamed my “Plex Media Server” folder, started from scratch, just added my music only, it scanned a few albums and continued scanning, so i created a test collection of Music with 4 or 5 artists. then tried to play that collection, got the same Fing error !!!

what is going on here ??!!
here are debug logs of me repro’ing the issue… I first tried 2 different Music Collections that were Artist or Album based they failed with the message, then i started playing my Collection of just 200+ Songs and it played fine, then i generated the logs.

Plex Media Server Logs_2021-08-27_17-44-54.zip (798.4 KB)

2

i noticed that if i edit the collection of 200+ songs, under the “Info” section it lists the full path to each song… but if i do the same for a collection of Artists or Albums Files is Empty ! this must mean something but as i stated this was working fine 2 weeks or so ago. again deleting the collection and recreating it doesn’t help. also i totally installed removed Plex and installed new, with using a new Plex Media Server folder having it create a new dbase everything from scratch, point it to my music as i already described, try to create a collection of Album or Artists and smh still no good . Something got broken in plex media server.

3

Agreed. I just tried the same thing. Playing a collection of albums reports “an error occurred loading items to play.”

4

This issue has been filed. Thank you for reporting it.

5

@atomatth , what’s weird now is those collections play fine on my iphone app, but still in the plex web app i get the error. I’m happy because when i play them most times it’s from my phone but still every so often i might want to listen to them while on my PC so still needs to get fixed within the web player. I just checked the iphone app a few days ago and thought the issue just went away, but no it’s still here just on the web player only. not sure what changed to make it work on the iphone app other than if the iphone app had an update and got automatically updated on my phone like most apps do. i did not change anything within my windows plex server or upgrade plex.

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Please when is this going to get fixed ??!

also i’m getting a new error when adding something to a collection that is based on Artists now.Capture

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I’m able to reproduce. It seems to be tied to a deleted collection that though appears to be deleted, isn’t. You should be able to Create a new collection and this action will clear out the “deleted” problematic Collection making it so that going forward you won’t see this error. Well, until you delete another Artist Collection. This issue only seems to be affecting Artist Collections.

I’ll add this finding to the issue. Thanks again for reporting.

8

I can reproduce the issue with collections of Artists and of Albums.

Before I reproduced this (in response to this thread), I had never created a collection of albums or artists, only tracks. When I tried this, I created collections with unique names. I created one collection by adding Artists, and two collections by adding Albums. They all exhibit this problem.

9

this issue is still happening!!! i created a brand new album collection for christmas and i CANNOT play it from the plex web player on windows, playing from iphone works fine

1 Like
10

Same issue for me, I created the collection by adding Albums only from the web interface. The ‘By Collection’ folder on my rendering device is empty and trying to add the collection to the queue on the web interface causes a playback error message :frowning: (v1.25.2.5319.6000)

11

Plex developers please fix this it is STILL an issue with however many versions of plex have come out since this post… it really sucks, because i like to game on my PC and listen to music using the web player but i CAN’T because this bug won’t allow me to play Music Collections made up of Albums or Artists, but only collections made up of Songs :frowning: , and i’m not going to sit here and add every single song from 50 different albums when all i need to do is be able to randomly play songs from a Collection of 50 Albums make sense ? yes :slight_smile: , thanks.

12

hey. sorry this has not been solved yet. Have not forgotten about it from what I can see it bug report dev have not figured out cause yet. it also appears to be happening with a collection of TV shows.

14

Thank you ! that’s all i wanted to know that someone was aware and working on it.

15

This is affecting me too, but only on the Windows and web clients. PlexAmp, Android, and Android TV clients can play the collection. It also hangs playback when I use the Android client to Fling the queue to Plex for Windows.

Plex for Windows Version 1.40.1.2823-6f60f3a7 / Plex Web Version 4.74.1

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Open music library
  2. Set sorting to All → Albums → By Album Artist
  3. Multiselect several albums to add to a collection
  4. Add To… → Add To Collection…
  5. Insert name for new collection, save it
  6. Go to collections tab
  7. Click “Play” on new collection

Logs from the client: pfw-collection-log.json.log (11.9 KB)
There do not appear to be any relevant logs on the server.

Trying to switch off some now-controversial streaming platforms, so I hope this helps to get it fixed promptly
:slight_smile:

16

still an issue even after i just updated to windows plex server 1.25.5.5492, saw some fixed about music collections that was not my issue but i was hoping they sneaked it in some how but NOPE.

17

this is still an issue and has not been fixed.

18

still not fixed windows plex server version Version 1.25.7.5604 …

sitting at my PC trying to play a collection of artists from plex web player and I have to just use my iphone instead :frowning: please fix this please…

19

I thought about trying the Windows Plex app player instead of the web plex player and still it has the same exact issues as the web… well back to listening to collections from my iphone

20

i posted about this back in Aug 2021 so it’s been an issue since then, i REALLY hope this gets fixed soon. I use my PC all the time to listen to music while working or gaming it’s annoying that i have to use my phone instead to play collections of Artists or Albums

21

this is still an issue please dev team when will this be debugged and RCA’ed with a fix ?? !! thanks