And lo, as it was foretold, the latest update to Plex For XBox appears to have fixed the issue (though I’m aware I’ve jumped the gun on this before, so I could be wrong): version 5.18.1, which came out in the last week or so, has so far been running smoothly for me.
Of course, nothing mentioned in any release notes anywhere to even acknowledge that the problem existed in the first place. As is the Plex way.
Love you, Plex.
As a developer myself, I’m guessing one of the devs (or maybe the whole team) realised what they’d done wrong previously and snuck the fix into the update but kept it on the downlow. Hey, we’ve all done it. No judgement here. 
Wait, nope. Jumped the gun, obviously. It’s still not right. No buffering or crashing, but it (PFX) has gone unresponsive: it’s still playing the music in the queue, but when I navigated to the Settings menu, it got stuck there; it would let me navigate within the menu, but it wouldn’t then let me back out to the home screen or the Now Playing screen. I had to quit and restart.
Also, when I played a TV series (with Autoplay ticked), instead of auto-playing the next episode, it just froze. Maybe unrelated, perhaps. But it’s still not working as it should, is it?
Aaaaand now it’s crashing again too when playing music.
So I most definitely jumped the gun.
It’s still broken.
I take back what I said earlier. I don’t love you at all, Plex.
More info on this issue - although I’ve come to think I’m just yelling into the void here:
If I ‘pull’ from Plex For Xbox (PFX) rather than ‘push’ from Plex for Windows (PFW), everything seems to work as it should: no buffering, no crashing at either end, and if (having started playing music on PFX) I then launch PFW and connect, the two stay in sync - by which I mean, PFW always shows as Now Playing exactly what is playing on PFX. Even if I then amend the play queue using PFW - ie, add tracks, change the play order, delete tracks - everything still behaves as it should.
By contrast, if I try to ‘push’ from PFW to PFX, it either buffers and errors immediately and I have to restart everything (PFW, PFX and PMS); or it’ll play a few minutes of the first track and then buffer and error, or it’ll get to the end of a track and then PFX will crash; if I skip to the next track as soon as it starts buffering, it’ll play the next track (and may or may not buffer or crash). If I get lucky and it play a few tracks in a row without issue (which does happen, albeit very rarely), sooner or later PFW will fall behind - by which I mean, the track that’s showing as Now Playing in PFW will be the previous track, while PFX has moved on to the next track. When this happens, the track time and progress bar in PFW are actually as per the current track (the track that’s playing in PFX), but the artwork, track name, artist, etc, that are showing in PFW are still the previous track. When this happens, if in PFW I do one of the following, it ‘nudges’ PFW on so that it then shows the track that is actually currently playing: 1) click Shuffle (regardless of whether it’s On or Off; 2) click Repeat so that it moves to the next Repeat mode, whatever that might be; 3) go into the Play Queue and make a change such as add a track, remove a track, or even just change the play order by moving a track to another position in the queue.
The fact that everything works perfectly if I start my listening session using PFX - even if I then start meddling with the Play Queue using PFW - surely means my setup and network aren’t to blame here. The issue must lie somewhere in the Plex software, whether it’s PFX, PFW or PMS.
Surely someone else out there uses Plex for Xbox as I do - ie, for playing music - and surely someone ‘pushes’ the music using PFW, no? I can’t be the only one, surely? If I’m not, then surely someone else is experiencing these issues? Come on, guys. Don’t leave me hanging.
I came across this topic, while googling about why my Plex on Xbox can freeze while playing audio/video. I don’t know if this relates, but maybe it will help someone. It seems like Plex software can freeze, if directory on Plex server, where audio/video files are, is shared with some cloud storage software. In my case I used the same directory for Plex files on server and for WesternDigital Mycloud filesync. I couldn’t play queue on Xbox plex client - “autoplay” froze, sometimes I couldn’t change audio/video options during playing - plex client became unresponsive. These all were fixed right after I had disabled filesync with cloud on server side.
Thanks, @truecopy, that’s interesting. I do have Dropbox on my PC (where the media server and music library lives) but it’s set to run manually rather than at startup, so that’s not the culprit.
So far the workaround of starting my listening session by ‘pulling’ rather than ‘pushing’ - ie, using PFX to choose something from the library and start playing - is working. Once it’s started playing, I can then connect PFW and control the play queue from there with no issues.
If I stop play (ie, clear the play queue) and then ‘push’ (ie, start another play queue using PFW), the issues resurface.
It’s not a fix, but it’s a pretty good workaround.
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