@MovieFan.Plex said:
Thanks guys for the recent info. The issue going away while plugged in is a new twist. Can you check your phone’s settings to see if there are any power saving features enabled. See if disabling any of these help. Also, there is a power setting for WiFi that can turn it off when it’s not being used. I have mine set to always be on. I’ll try changing that and seeing if I can finally reproduce on my end.
Thanks for hopping back in here. My Wi-Fi is set to “Keep Wi-Fi on during sleep: Always”. Tried Battery Optimization and set Plex as “not optimized” with no success either.
Music will consistently stop within 4 songs, sometimes right in the middle of the first song. One common thing I have noticed is discussion about this issue happening with Nexus/Pixel phones. Do the Plex developers have access to a “modern” Nexus phone to test on?
No offense meant, but the plugged in workaround has been talked about in this thread since December 2016. There is a comment back from December 2016 that music would continue to play on battery if the screen never went to sleep. I am about to test this here and will provide an update.
I have two other Nexus phones at home that both have this issue that I can easily recreate. Would logs from those devices help?
I experience the same issue, whether plugged in or not, on wifi or not, on LTE/3g or not. It doesn’t seem to matter. Just on iphones for me, not on the web. If I can offer any additional information, please let me know.
@Steve1200 said:
I experience the same issue, whether plugged in or not, on wifi or not, on LTE/3g or not. It doesn’t seem to matter. Just on iphones for me, not on the web. If I can offer any additional information, please let me know.
Steve, please don’t take this the wrong way. But this thread is for discussing issues with music playback using the Android (mobile) app. If these issues are occurring with your iPhone you really need to have a discussion in the appropriate forum: https://forums.plex.tv/categories/ios
@Tecco said:
No offense meant, but the plugged in workaround has been talked about in this thread since December 2016. There is a comment back from December 2016 that music would continue to play on battery if the screen never went to sleep. I am about to test this here and will provide an update.
Yes, but at the time it was also in relation to the screen off issue, which was fixed. That fixed didn’t really have anything to do with being plugged in. That was preventing the issue from occurring and since it was fixed, we never looked into why. This seems to be preventing this synced playback issue too which I hadn’t put together. There are some sync actions that occur/don’t occur when plugged in, so this might lead to something.
@Tecco said:
No offense meant, but the plugged in workaround has been talked about in this thread since December 2016. There is a comment back from December 2016 that music would continue to play on battery if the screen never went to sleep. I am about to test this here and will provide an update.
Yes, but at the time it was also in relation to the screen off issue, which was fixed. That fixed didn’t really have anything to do with being plugged in. That was preventing the issue from occurring and since it was fixed, we never looked into why. This seems to be preventing this synced playback issue too which I hadn’t put together. There are some sync actions that occur/don’t occur when plugged in, so this might lead to something.
Ok, thanks for the thorough explanation.
I was finally able to play synced music without interruption by setting the screen time out to 30 minutes (phone not plugged in). While the screen was on the music played just fine, where as before it was stopping with in the first 4 songs.
I am going to dig deeper into this. Let it play with screen on and continue to play after the screen turns off, see if it stops and then pull some logs. Going to then look at all the variations of plugged in, not plugged in, screen on, screen off and put all the notes together in this thread.
@Tecco said:
I was finally able to play synced music without interruption by setting the screen time out to 30 minutes (phone not plugged in). While the screen was on the music played just fine, where as before it was stopping with in the first 4 songs.
Was you issue with the screen off? That should have already been fixed. i thought this other issue was with the screen on.
With the screen on, it most likely prevents the phone from dozing. dozing is what is triggering this problem, but disabling (setting to Battery Optimization to Not Optimized) on the Plex app doesn’t help
I’ve noticed that the playback always stops playing near the end of the track (maybe when Plex is getting ready to queue up the next song).
Issue present: Synced music stops playing randomly (usually takes no more than four songs) while on battery power with the screen off. Toggling play/pause, 10 seconds back, or 30 seconds forward does not resume playback. The only way to get playback to resume is to hit next track.
Issue NOT present: Synced music will play fine on battery power with the screen ON (set screen to stay awake for 30 minutes) and will also play fine while phone is charging with either the screen on or off.
Testing done: Every time there is a new Plex app version or Plex server version, all synced music is deleted and then re-synced to device. Tested with a variety of source music formats, no change in source format effects the music stopping. Radio status (wi-fi, bluetooth, cellular) has no effect on this issue either. Tested on my older Nexus 6 which is on Android 7.0, and the same issue is present there. This lines up with a theory I had, that this issue started with the release of Android 7.0. The Nexus 6P running the beta version was recently factory wiped and NOT restored from backup. And is running with minimal app installations, no snapchat, twitter, facebook, etc. The Nexus 6 device was recently factory wiped and NOT restored from backup and is running no additional apps besides Plex, just the defaults apps present after a factory wipe.
Thoughts: My personal feeling is that this can’t be an isolated issue. I can reproduce this issue on three separate Nexus phones. It is well known that Nexus phones run the “purest” version of Android. If the Plex developers don’t have access to a Nexus device I would suggest one is purchased for testing. If for some reason that can’t be done, I would have no issues lending my Nexus 6 device for as long as needed to correct this issue.
Please let me know if there is any other testing that you would like to see, or any other logs that can be provided.
@labashosky2010 said:
With the screen on, it most likely prevents the phone from dozing. dozing is what is triggering this problem, but disabling (setting to Battery Optimization to Not Optimized) on the Plex app doesn’t help
@Tecco said: Issue present: Synced music stops playing randomly (usually takes no more than four songs) while on battery power with the screen off. Toggling play/pause, 10 seconds back, or 30 seconds forward does not resume playback. The only way to get playback to resume is to hit next track.
Issue NOT present: Synced music will play fine on battery power with the screen ON (set screen to stay awake for 30 minutes) and will also play fine while phone is charging with either the screen on or off.
Sorry guys. There’s some misunderstanding going on. A few pages back I mentioned the 2 issues we were looking at. 1 - playing anything with screen off and 2 - playing synced content with screen on. I thought we were working on #2. Your comments above sound more like #1.
@Tecco said:
Do you want me to test against streaming in the same scenarios from my previous post? I haven’t yet, as I wanted to narrow the scope of testing.
I’m still confused if you are testing against issue 1 or issue 2. Your previous post sounded like 1.
@Tecco said:
Do you want me to test against streaming in the same scenarios from my previous post? I haven’t yet, as I wanted to narrow the scope of testing.
I’m still confused if you are testing against issue 1 or issue 2. Your previous post sounded like 1.
If I can be more detailed in my explanation please let me know. I am not taking the supposed issue #1 or #2 into account when I am testing. I am only testing against the issues that I am seeing.
That said, you could safely say my issue falls under #1; “playing anything with screen off”. But I want to make sure we are all in agreement with the definition of: “playing anything with screen off”. The issue of “playing anything with screen off” should only mean: playing MUSIC while on BATTERY power with SCREEN OFF.
I don’t do any music streaming to my phones, so I don’t have any test feedback in regards to music stopping while streaming. I was asking if it would help the Plex developers to provide testing feedback on these three phones using streamed music.
@“MovieFan.Plex” Just played 2 sync’d tracks, on battery power, with the screen on. First track was with Plex in the foreground, no stoppage. Second track was with Plex in the background, it cut off around the last 20-30 seconds.
Don’t have time to test more right now, but I think that first track with Plex in the foreground may have been a fluke.
@Tecco said: Issue present: Synced music stops playing randomly (usually takes no more than four songs) while on battery power with the screen off. Toggling play/pause, 10 seconds back, or 30 seconds forward does not resume playback. The only way to get playback to resume is to hit next track.
This is the exact issue I have. I’m using a OnePlus, which may be the closest line to Nexus, second to the Pixels in terms of software. @“MovieFan.Plex” what device are you testing on?
I am also facing this issue running Android 7.1.1 on OnePlus 3T. I had an issue with my songs playing straight away over data. It would take about 3 minutes to even start playing and this wasn’t because of a slow network as WiFi also caused this issue. Whereas synced content plays instantly but stops playback after a few songs.
If anyone is also facing the delayed remote playback issue - how I fixed it was to enable “Use Android Media Player” in the “Advanced - Player” settings.
Conclusion: Both remote and synced content now play instantly but will stop after 2-4 songs and the only way to resume playback is to skip forward/back to start again. As I mostly listen to my music in the car this is not suitable as my music stops after around 10 minutes of driving! This is really annoying as Plex is my main app and I run all my media through Plex Libraries and don’t want to have to switch to another provider just for Music.
There seems to ne a host of sync issues, including actually syncing content to a device, playing synced files correctly and not displaying artwork - basically, sync is a tad broken, still!
Having said that, since my phone received its OS update from Sony my sync playback issues have cleared up but still missing artwork here and there though. The main focus of the update was to help with battery life and a host of bug fixes etc - it would therefore suggest the issue lies in battery management but I no idea why that would be different when you stream over the network or when you play synced content (I’m just a user, not a deverloper/coder)!
@“MovieFan.Plex” Can you provide a list of Plex employee devices that you guys have been testing this on (I believe it was said that no employee was experiencing these issues)? That way we can eliminate some more variables from this.
