I’m pretty new to the Plex community so I’m sorry if this is a known issue. I’ve been using Plex/Plexamp for a couple weeks now, and am quite happy so far; however, this issue has been bothering me quite a bit.
I can’t for the life of me figure out why sometimes the shuffle/star/repeat buttons appear in the CarPlay UI and sometimes they don’t. It seems completely random to me. I realize there are times when it doesn’t make sense to show some of the buttons (e.g., if you’re listening to “radio” then it doesn’t make sense to show the shuffle button), but I’m getting inconsistent behavior when playing the exact same songs in the exact same way.
For example, in the CarPlay UI, I went to a single album in my library, and tapped on a couple different tracks to directly play them, or then skipped to get to the next track, and I got almost all combinations of the three buttons I mentioned. Here are some screenshots showing different outcomes on 2 different tracks:
The inconsistency is really driving me kinda nuts. I’m getting a bit superstitious about what causes it and how I might magically conjure up all 3 buttons (I mainly just use the star button so I’m saddest when it fails to show up)
Potentially relevant details:
I’m running Plexamp 4.8.4 on iOS 16.7.1.
The web UI for my server says it is Version 4.117.3
The apt plexmediaserver package running on my Raspberry Pi 4 says it is “Version: 1.32.6.7557-1cf77d501”
That may be the case for Plexamp, but it doesn’t seem to be an issue with any of the other audio player apps with CarPlay support I’ve used that have buttons on the bottom row, including:
Apple Music
Spotify
YouTube Music
Audible
Libby (library audiobook player).
Overcast (single dev podcast app)
VLC (open source)
It makes sense that Apple Music would have a leg up because they have internal knowledge of the API and probably use functionality unavailable to 3rd party apps, but the single dev and open source apps I listed above also don’t seem to have the problem either.
Maybe they sacrificed a goat to the CarPlay gods. Have you guys tried that?
Is everyone who uses Plexamp with CarPlay having this issue? If not, then what is different about the cases where it isn’t happening?
I totally get your point. FWIW I used CarPlay extensively on a recent trip and didn’t see the issue, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t a bug on our side as well.
Another related issue is that clicking on the album title used to take you to the artist so you could pick another album by the same artist. Now, it does nothing except once in a great while, inexplicably, it works…
That’s easier. Apple places a limit on the menu depth on a CarPlay app. Exceed it, and the app just crashes unceremoniously. So we have to keep track of how many screens are in the stack and ignore the request to show artist info if it’s too large.
Actually what are we talking about here now? The bottom buttons or clicking on an album title? I think the album title clicking is working for me a lot more often than it used to.
But I was talking about the bottom buttons since that’s the topic of this thread. Those seem to still be disappearing sometimes.
I apologise if you feel the thread was hijacked, but I wanted to ask him in the place in which we had been discussing it.
It’s a good idea to keep threads on topic in case other people with the same issue end up here via search (and it’s easy to create new topics). I was confused which of the two issues you were talking about in your reply (as was Elan it appears).
Yes, I agree. However, when I raised the issue, it wasn’t clear that it was a different or unrelated issue. And when a co-founder of the company responded, I was keen to reply in the same thread rather than in a new one in which there’d be no assurance of getting any useful replies.
Was always my suspicion…