I have been trying to use my Plex server to playback music to my iPhone and I am running into a lot of buffering issues and I do not understand why. I’ve tried setting the iOS app to 192k, 320k and original and the issues all persist. My Plex server at home is connected to the internet via AT&T gigapower fiber.
Here is a screenshot of a speed test from my Plex server.
My iPhone is the only device I use for music. It works just fine when I am at home on the same network at my Plex server. I only get these issues when playing back in the car or at work
you should check you upload speed from your computer with server on it, not you phone. odd your upload speed is more than 4 times faster than your download
@Stuke00 said:
So what can I do to fix my playback issues?
I can’t make recommendations without info. need to see logs from music playback failure
try to play music something
get error or spinner
stop playback
get logs from app and server.
@BigWheel said:
you should check you upload speed from your computer with server on it, not you phone. odd your upload speed is more than 4 times faster than your download
@Stuke00 said:
So what can I do to fix my playback issues?
I can’t make recommendations without info. need to see logs from music playback failure
try to play music something
get error or spinner
stop playback
get logs from app and server.
I did provide the logs, I turned on verbose logging from my phone and uploaded the logs here after it happened.
The upload screenshot is from the server, the download screenshot is from my phone remotely.
Speedtest from my server. Upload is a lot higher than download, I may need to call AT&T about that but my bandwidth is definitely more than enough to stream music.
the server log you provided earlier only has stuff from when you were playing a video. i do see some errors in your new iOS log and it seems it cannot find file on your server for some reason. I want to check that the server is even receiving the request. so need server and iOS logs covering the same playback attempt of a music file that fails.
I deleted my music library and readded it hoping that would solve it but it seems it did not. Still get the errors. Attached logs from iOS and the server.
Error playing song Ebb And Flow. The file is definitely there. A lot of the time I can dismiss the error and try again and it will work. But still frustrating that this happens very frequently.
I posted about these symptoms in another thread (here), but your problem sounds very similar to the issues I am seeing as well. I am going to take @BigWheel 's advice and see if I can produce some clean logs from the server and my iOS device. It’s getting super frustrating, though, as the problem seems to be happening about every 2nd or 3rd song for me now. I am also on a fiber connection, with a gigabit local network and a dedicated machine running my Plex server, so there definitely shouldn’t be any buffering issues in my mind. In fact, as I mentioned in my post, if I click on the next track and then back again to the track having issues playing, 9 times out of 10 it will start playing back immediately…so I’m thinking connection/bandwidth is not the issue. It feels more like my device, or browser, is making the request and then PMS is either not recieving it, or failing to respond to it. But who knows.
@djcordel said:
I posted about these symptoms in another thread (here), but your problem sounds very similar to the issues I am seeing as well. I am going to take @BigWheel 's advice and see if I can produce some clean logs from the server and my iOS device. It’s getting super frustrating, though, as the problem seems to be happening about every 2nd or 3rd song for me now. I am also on a fiber connection, with a gigabit local network and a dedicated machine running my Plex server, so there definitely shouldn’t be any buffering issues in my mind. In fact, as I mentioned in my post, if I click on the next track and then back again to the track having issues playing, 9 times out of 10 it will start playing back immediately…so I’m thinking connection/bandwidth is not the issue. It feels more like my device, or browser, is making the request and then PMS is either not recieving it, or failing to respond to it. But who knows.
Yep that sounds similar. Always on a track skip, but for me it is pretty easy to reproduce since it happens A LOT.
@BigWheel said:
the server log you provided earlier only has stuff from when you were playing a video. i do see some errors in your new iOS log and it seems it cannot find file on your server for some reason. I want to check that the server is even receiving the request. so need server and iOS logs covering the same playback attempt of a music file that fails.
Yeah, this is getting super frustrating. No responses to my thread and it looks like no answers on yours either. How does one get actual support around here? This waiting for the community to respond to whatever tickets interest them, and ignoring the ones that don’t is not working. I guess this is the trade-off you deal with when something is FREE. At this point, I’d rather be paying for it so I could get someone on the phone and figure out what’s actually going on here. I’m now just using my Google Music so that I can keep music playing while I work, which is pretty lame considering the time and money I have sunk into getting a Plex server up and running. SMH
@djcordel said:
Yeah, this is getting super frustrating. No responses to my thread and it looks like no answers on yours either. How does one get actual support around here? This waiting for the community to respond to whatever tickets interest them, and ignoring the ones that don’t is not working. I guess this is the trade-off you deal with when something is FREE. At this point, I’d rather be paying for it so I could get someone on the phone and figure out what’s actually going on here. I’m now just using my Google Music so that I can keep music playing while I work, which is pretty lame considering the time and money I have sunk into getting a Plex server up and running. SMH
I do pay for Plex pass though. I ended up just reactivating my iTunes Match instead. Really unfortunate and may reconsider my Plex pass next year.
True. I forget that I paid for a lifetime Plex Pass.
Anywho, I ran across this stating there was a new iOS release that fixed some music playback issues. I have not tested this myself yet, but likely will today as I’m working on things. Just figured I’d drop it here for you since we can’t seem to get any answers to this (in my mind, huge) problem.
@djcordel said:
True. I forget that I paid for a lifetime Plex Pass.
Anywho, I ran across this stating there was a new iOS release that fixed some music playback issues. I have not tested this myself yet, but likely will today as I’m working on things. Just figured I’d drop it here for you since we can’t seem to get any answers to this (in my mind, huge) problem.
Actually so far so good today for Plex music. Not sure if it is related to this release or not, but there are a couple other quirks I’ve noticed. It does not seem to buffer the entire song. Sometimes walking around work listening to music, I’ll lose wifi and switch to LTE. My song will be interrupted every time. Also, I have remote quality set to 320kbps but it is doing a direct play of my lossless files.
Stream Details
Media
Container: mp4
Audio Stream: direct play
Codec: alac
Channels: 2
