So this Easter I decided to try this Tidal feature. It was working at the start of the week, but over time some songs have started stopping with a DRM related error. This seems to follow the song itself as opposed to the platform, which is what I would expect if I had any DRM issues. I have tried re-linking my tidal account and it doesn’t seem to solve the problem. Has anybody else come across this over the last week?
PS: It seems arbitrary which songs are affected and some work for a while with others getting messed up straight away.
It’s getting worse on my end. Like I wrote it initially happened now and then for some songs and would stick around once it happened. Now everything throws this error. Gotta say I’m about to just give up using Plex for music as this is honestly defeats the entire purpose of having a Tidal integration and I may as well just use their app exclusively. It’s a shame that I loose out on my lossless quality files, but this is just to annoying to deal with
So yeah. Either because you wrote a comment @Noah0504 or because I switched logging on Plex in Chrome to Verbose in anticipation of attaching logs it now suddenly started working. Again this is not surprising. Like I said the problem was intermittent in the past. I’m gonna try skipping through a playlist and see how far I get before I can upload a log entry.
PS: If I put on my system architect/developer hat what I suspect is happening here is that some sort of cached data on the client side is not cleared properly or Tidal is for reasons unknown locking down the option of playing back stuff from Plex because it has seen recent activity from a Tidal app. Both are horrible design flaws in my opinion as you can’t expect people to run around shutting down their Plex or Tidal app in certain ways on modern smart devices. If only one device can playback music at once then it’s the vendors problem to distinguish an open application doing nothing from one that’s actually playing music.
And then I had my daily quota of two Tidal tracks and now we are ■■■■■■ again. This time with the situation where no error is reported or audio heard yet playback appears to be happening:
Also I tried downloading the client logs, but I can’t find any sort of reference there to playback of these tracks (Bulletproof and In For The Kill worked a moment ago) being stared
Are these not the correct logs to upload for troubleshooting?
So here is my log files. First i playback some songs via the Tidal menu category and an existing Tidal playlist. This works fine. Then I search for La Roux in my music library and attempt to playback In For The Kill which is one of their songs that I have added. I then get the DRM error. I retry playing the song once, but the error persists.
NB: Let me know asap if there is something in the logs I should remove. I tried finding info about this, but I only found an article regarding the server and nothing about the client.
Someone a little more inclined will probably have to take a peek at the client logs.
So, I do see you are using the web client, and that’s what I originally wondered. I would have had a suggesting to deal with the DRM error, but now I’m not sure what’s going on if you’re having a problem of it playing no audio, but not getting the same error as before.
This is totally not a solution, but have you tried the new Plexamp? If anything, if you did take it for a spin, see if you have any issues playing TIDAL tracks there.
Also, if your TIDAL subscription isn’t through Plex, have you tried re-linking your account?
EDIT: Also, are you using the Plex.tv web client or the local client?
I’m using www.plex.tv, but the point is that this is happening across all my devices. And yes I have tried re-linking the account. It didn’t seem to do much. One thing I did notice is that right now all the issues seem to be related to Tidal tracks that I have added to my own music library. And they seem to cause problems far more often if I try to play them back from said library as opposed to via the Tidal category. Also while looking at the dashboard while gathering the logs I noticed this:
From the image it seems that my server thinks it’s playing back the entire track, but even though I’m on the same local network and should have a direct connection nothing is sent my way. Presumably due to the DRM error seen in the logs i attached earlier. The only thing I can think of here is that my Plex server is running on a virtual machine and as such connected to its own virtual network provided by the host. This shouldn’t matter though as everything is routed correctly both on the virtual machine and the virtual machine host. However I don’t know how the DRM feature incorporated in Plex works and if this routing between different subnets can cause any trouble with verifying my right to playback Tidal tracks.
I also listen to TIDAL tracks that have been added to my library and it works fine.
So it’s happening on other clients such as Android or iOS? When it fails on those devices, does Plex through an error or does it just not play audio?
Chrome should be using Widevine for the DRM. So, make sure you didn’t somehow disable that.
Also, because the dashboard shows local playback, I would think your VM network is configured correctly. That shouldn’t be the problem (I wouldn’t think, anyway).
Widevine works and is detected per the logs. It complains about the license that’s undefined when things fail. When things works appropriately it says “Resolving DRM license /library/parts/3006318-LOSSLESS/license”. On the other devices I either get a similar DRM error as mentioned in earlier posts or a message stating that the audio is unsupported/unrecognised.
The latter I guess is because the error is thrown by a different part of the playback chain or because a hardware decoder is used for the audio and the app fails to clean up properly when the DRM fails and feeds garbage to the decoder. This is pure speculation on my part though. Still with the problem occurring across all platforms I would guess resolving it one of them would resolve it across all of them. It would be a different story if the issue was just found on PC.
The question though is what is this DRM license and where is it stored or generated. Is it on the media server, is it with Plex, is it with Tidal or is it created per client upon launch?
That I can’t answer. Maybe someone from Plex will spot this thread.
Eh, sorry I couldn’t be of more help. I’m searching through the forums to see if I find anything that you can maybe try. I’ll post back if I come across anything.
No worries. I’m grateful for the help. If you come across something similar on the forums share it, but don’t spend any extra time on this. I have searched through them myself and I’m sure if something fairly obvious was there I would have found it already
This is still ■■■■■■■ however I have noticed that a lot of the time logging out and back in to plex.tv fixes the issue. That said how long the fix lasts depends. Sometimes it can go minutes and sometimes days. Seems to me like the license that suddenly goes missing , see earlier logs for context, is only issued at logon and can then be invalidated without renewal after an arbitrary amount of time.
Considering the lack of feedback here I reckon there is only a handful of people even using Tidal with Plex so I guess I might as well just stop paying for it. I’m still gonna bump this thread until I’m blocked though. I payed for a lifetime Plex pass subscription and I’m apperantly not the only one having issues with Tidal. Plex staff can dam well come up with an answer even if all they say is we will never give this issue any piority
Sadly from what I can tell it’s not the same issue. For one thing the errors I get are usually DRM related and when that doesn’t happen it usually just fails without any explanation. Also it does not seem tied to specific albums on Tidal and appears random although adding any track to my Plex library seems to up the chances of the error appearing. Once found the error also doesn’t stick to a specific track, album or artist. However once the error has appeared it seems to affect all Tidal content for a while.
I’m finding the same thing, random Tidal albums won’t play through Plex. For example I added the latest Menzingers album last week and all was fine, yesterday it wouldn’t play in any Plex app. I’ve tried picking random artists and some albums play other don’t. Another example is Red Hot Chilli Pepper, most live albums won’t play but studio albums do.
@Anderstn, I concur my issue in that other thread is probably not related. But I wanted to commend you & @Noah0504 for an excellent effort and persistence to find a solution. You’ve done more legwork & hypothesizing that most others. I can’t think of anything that you haven’t already tried.
Seriously, I really feel for you & hope the moderators &/or developers give this some attention. It really saddens me when my Tidal content has issues, especially when I seem to be the only one with the problem. I’ve loved the integration of Tidal into my own library and works 90%+ of the time, so i’m generally happy with the rare exception or tweak request. It’s a big next level of confusion for me when it works one day & not the next. Super frustrating.
My only DRM-like issue was solved when I switched my desktop player to use the URL with https instead of http (but that obviously didn’t affect the iOS player, etc). So that’s not your problem. All my other ideas are the easy ones: reboot & re-link Tidal. And one of your recent posts you mentioned “subnets”. … you lost me at subnets. I’m out of my depth.
Once again thanks to anyone trying to help me out here. As for the DRM errors they still pop up seemingly at random during playback. So to whomever is responsible for this integration at Plex HQ I would like to extend a middle finger for ignoring those of us who struggle with this “feature” of Plex.
I’m out of my depth.