The Plex Alexa skill is still working (Play Some Music, Play The Song, Play The Album, etc), but if you ask Alexa to stop before it is finished, the dashboard retains the stopped item indefinitely. I can clear it by playing a single song in its entirety. What changed?
I deleted all device authorizations except the two servers (only one has a music library). The Dashboard was clear. I reauthorized the Alexa Plex skill… Had it play music and the Dashboard reflected it. Told it to stop, and the music stopped, but the Dashboard did not clear. Added another Alexa device, started music, reflected on the dashboard. Told it to stop, it did, and the item on the dashboard went away. But the item for the first device remained. Started music on the first device again, and the dashboard replaced the stuck item with the new one. Told it to stop, it did, but now the new song was orphaned on the dashboard. Again, the way to clear it is to ask that player to play a single song and let it complete.
Using just one Alexa device, if I start music again with Play Some Music, the song is correctly reflected in the orphaned dashboard item. If I Skip, the next song shows immediately. But if I say Stop, the music stops but the item persists until a song is played to completion.
Experimenting with three Alexa devices one by one… Now one of the three has the problem described above, but the other two behave normally (the dashboard item disappears when you ask Plex to stop).
Looking at the authorized devices, there is only one Amazon Alexa entry. Maybe all this is an problem keeping multiple devices straight within the Plex Alexa skill.
Yesterday, I cleaned up my local network by moving most of the devices on Ethernet with reserved addresses to the low number IP addresses…
Only one of my 9 Alexa devices, the Tap, had been previously given a reserved address. I unreserved it to be consistent with the other devices, and hopefully to see a change in the problem reported in this thread.
Once I did that, all hell seemed to break loose. Telling one device to play caused another device to play; stopping a song on one device stopped a different device.
Today, I deauthorized the Plex Alexa skill. Then I deleted the device authorization for Alexa on the Plex music server. Reauthorized, then tried to play an album on the Tap. It started OK, but then I had the problem reported in a recent thread, I had to say Skip to get the next song to plsy. This was the case for the whole album.
Luckily, I have the Alexa Emby skill set up (though the setup involves a secured server). It doesn’t seem to have this problem.
I certainly hope the Plex team will address this, because the Plex skill is a better skill when working.
Here is a telling comment from another current thread:
“Also just to confirm for anyone i’ve rolled back to Version 1.23.3.4706 and shuffle from playlists, playing more than 1 song from album all back working”
Also this:
May 5 Plex for Alexa - #35 by vanstinator
NEW:
- FLAC support! Direct Play for First Party Echo devices and Direct Stream support on Sonos and Bose devices
FIXES:
- On some devices moving through the queue with
nextorpreviouscould cause playback to fail
The latter seems likely to be the culprit.
As suggested, I reverted to Windows version 4707, and it fixed the one song at a time problem. I will see how it handles multiple Echo devices later today.
OK, after rolling back to Plex Media Server 4707, which fixed the universally-experienced “one song at a time” problem, I learned more about the problem I reported at the top of this thread.
First, somehow, a number of my Echo devices got into a single Alexa Group (intended to be used to control of multiple devices such as smart light and plugs in a room). I didn’t consciously do it, maybe somehow I did it not realizing that Echos could even be in Groups.
At any rate, I got rid of all groups except the ones dealing with smart lights and plugs, then made sure no Echo devices were in there. This got Plex on Alexa working the way it should.
I used Dashboard in the Plex browser app, or Plex Dash on tablet to monitor what songs were playing from each Echo device. My 2nd and 3rd Gen Dots and Fire HD 8 behaved normally, that is, the queue was cleared after saying Stop.
However, the 1st Gen Echo and the Amazon Tap (the wireless 1st Gen-ish device) still did not clear the queue after a Stop command. This appears not to be a problem, as the next song to play bumps out the old item. If you play a single song, or let an album go to completion, the queue is cleared. If not, there is that phantom item on the Dashboard.
The trainwreck I described above seems to have occurred when multiple Echos (including one of the 1st Gen ones) got started up simultaneously due to being in the same Alexa Group, then getting their queues scrambled by the Group “broadcast”.
So my guess is that the 1st Gen devices maybe should not be included with other Echo devices in a Group. Possibly the other devices would do OK with Plex, but it would take some experimenting to find out.
I did some deregistering and reregistering of the Echo, the Tap and one of the 3rd Gen Dots along the way so that I would know I was really starting from scratch. This may be unnecessary.
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