PlexWeb no longer continuously streams audio, freezes after one song

Plex Players Desktop Players
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Server Version#: Version 1.13.9.5456 (linux)
Player Version#: Web Client Version 3.75.3
Browser Firefox Quantum: 62.0.3 (64-Bit) Web Browser

Problem description:
Selecting any of my music libraries, then displaying “All” , “Artists” and “By Title”
followed by pressing the “Shuffle” button, used to provide me with uninterrupted music for 2 - 3 days, until some network problem eventually stopped the connection.

Now, (or at least for the last dozen server releases or so) it happily plays the first song of the shuffle, then updates the graphics to that of the next song, and sits there for life, never actually starting to play the second, third, or any subsequent song. If I press the “Next” button, it will happily skip to the third song, and play that, but after that song plays. Exact same behaviour.

The little spinning circle acts as if it’s playing, the server shows the connection is active (even though its doing nothing), and it looks to be hung when attempting to load the next song. If I select the next song, manually, it starts and plays without problem. In fact, I have the exact same problem with playlists now too, the first song plays, and then they never play the second song. It just sits there frozen before it starts playing the second song.

At this point my plex has become totally unusable. I’ve been streaming 3rd party music, most of this year because of this issue. So here I’ve gotten annoyed enough to get around to posting, finally, does anybody have any ideas whats behind this, or how to get it working again?

thanks!

PS. I verified that if I go back to a really old server release, this problem goes away. I haven’t made an effort to figure out which server release the problem first showed up in, but it was quite a while ago.

1 Like
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I should also add, this does not occur in plex clients, such as the plex android client. That plays as expected, including playlists. This problem is only with the web-client.

Also interestingly, I just tried it using Chrome. And the problem is similar, yet different. It played 3 songs before it froze. So, same behaviour, but different number of songs before freezing. I thought it might have something to do with my screen saver, but it doesn’t seem to be.

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i just had mine running for about an hour uninterrupted. have you looked at server logs to see at the time it stops playing? or start playback then go to web app logs screen (while first song is still playing) to see what happens when it stops. (you said downgrading server worked so assuming server issue not web app issue at this point.)

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I’ll have a look at the log tonite. I haven’t looked yet.
Thanks for the response.

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Okay, check this one off to a loose nut behind the ‘keyboard’ problem. After looking at the logs, it was immediately apparent what was going wrong: permissions!
I wrote a script a while ago, which was busily background processing my content, and leaving in it’s wake broken plex permissions. As it’s been running these last few months, slowly my collection has been affected more and more, with it only recently getting so bad that I saw problems nearly immediately.

Duh!
Sorry for bothering you all.

1 Like
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Thank you for letting us know :slight_smile:

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Uh, not so quick. Turns out this IS a problem. Permissions were only part of the puzzle.
I’m still working out the exact details, but after playing MP3 files for an extended time, nearly all of my clients will invariably freeze, on songs that are FLAC encoded. I’ve also had it freeze on OGG encoded files, but that appears to be less consistent. And I should say, always occurs after playing MP3s for a while. Directly playing FLAC encoded music usually just works, and it doesn’t seem to fail the exact same number of songs later either.

I usually set my system up to randomly play songs in my collection, so it can take anywhere from 5 minutes to days to hit a FLAC encoded song, which is why it has taken so long to at least identify what is going on here. I’m going to create some playlists, and see if I can create something repeatable, to force the issue, now that I have a better idea of whats going on.

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Okay. The behaviour is pretty consistent. Pick any library of MP3s, they will play all day and all night. Create a library of FLAC encoded files, and the server consistently freezes between songs. If you manually start one song, say in an album of FLAC encoded songs, it will play fine, then will advance to the next song, but then never start playing it. This doesn’t happen every time, but its the exception when it actually does play automatically.

Seems there are still some critical issues with FLAC support.

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I found an album on our test server that is all FLAC i am testing with. I have not run into issue so far but will try other browsers.

Have you updated server to 1.14, if so was just curious if behavior is the same for you

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Server Version 1.14.0.5470, I still see the behaviour on Firefox using my default browser. I’ll also try other browsers, but in the past, I’ve seen this same behaviour also on Chrome.
I have a couple of FLAC albums that always cause this to happen, and some that it happens most of the time, but not always. As far as I can tell, I’ve encoded them identically, so I’m not at all clear what could be different between them. This is really turning into a needle in a haystack kind of problem-

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