About half my genre radio stations don’t work, and only show a wait cursor. This happens with Plexamp for Windows and iOS. (The server is Nvidia Shield.)
This happened when I deleted and rebuild my music library to deal with another issue that should be unrelated: I had a file that made metadata refresh choke, and the only way I could find around it was deleting the library and rebuilding it.
Once I pointed Plexamp at the new music library, I found that a lot of the Genre radio stations had stopped working. When I tried to play them, I just got a wait cursor. Yet other genre stations worked fine and everything worked fine with the same files when they were part of the previous, seemingly identical music library.
I can create a smart playlist that selects a single genre but it sure would be nice to use the genre radio stations as intended.
try playing one and then upload the server logs so we can have a look. a refresh all metadata on the library might help, as it needs popularity data to work in combination with the genre tags.
Verbose logs attached and I deleted the previous post.
Here is what I did:
In Plex for Windows I updated the log setting to Verbose and saved. (OOPS, I was supposed to do debug… deleted the log package since it was examined.)
Plexamp 3.2.1 for Windows had been up for about 15 minutes, but was idle
On the Plexamp home screen I clicked a genre station I knew was busted, and got a player screen with infinite wait cursor. (Well maybe not infinite. but it stuck around.)
I dismissed the player with the down arrow button, and hit the radio station again, and got the infinite wait again. I did this a couple more times.
I then played/paused an unrelated single track for a moment in an attempt to “reset” the genre radio.
I hit the bad genre radio button on the home page again. This time, I got a wait cursor for a second, and then the player screen went away and I was back on the home screen.
So, this log set shows the two ways I have seen genre radio fail: an indefinite wait, and a quick wait that dismissed the player automatically.
That all would have happened at about 12:32 PM in log time.
OK, so it is a popularity problem… interesting. Now here is the weird part: this exact genre radio station used to work. It stopped working when I deleted the music library and rebuilt it. The source music files/tags did not change, I just deleted the library and re-added the same media directory with the same library settings (in the screen shots upthread).
Can you think of a settings change to try to recover the popularity info?
Which of the many log files has the radio line you quoted?
However it turns out, thanks for the help, I feel better knowing why it failed.
Though, I would suggest an enhancement: when a radio station fails to start, show a relevant error message.
We’ve been revamping (read: improving) the way we fetch the popularity data for music. It’s a work in progress, and it’s possible in some cases that results in popularity data being lost (maybe even a bug).
Easiest thing to do is check the XML for a track you think should have popularity data (look for ratingCount), and if you don’t see it:
Refresh the album and check again
If it’s still not there and you think it should be, paste in the complete XML for the track so we can have a look.
Excellent, thanks. I will try that and start a new thread later if I find anything that looks juicy.
One last question on how radio works: if a genre station won’t work due to a lack of popularity data, that implies that all tracks in that genre have failed to get popularity data, right? Like, if I had 100 albums in a genre, and Plex only had popularity info for one of them, I would get a radio station of of just the tracks in that one album. Right?
