Hi, I am having a little problem with my Plex server and transcoding music from FLAC to whatever Alexa wants. When I invoke Alexa to ask plex to play a song “Alexa ask plex to play song waterloo”, it responds “playing waterloo by abba…” But no music is played. This song is encoded in FLAC. I have other music stored in MP3 and it plays fine. I looked into the logs and found the following output started immediately after making the request. I am at a loss to understand what the log is trying to tell me.
I am running plex on an FreeNAS 11. Any suggestions concerning how I might debug this problem would be appreciated
Jun 07, 2018 05:58:12.660 [0x80cf66000] INFO - [PlexRelay] Allocated port 19543 for remote forward to localhost:32401
Jun 07, 2018 05:58:14.715 [0x80c32f200] ERROR - Throttle: timed out trying to read chunk -1
Jun 07, 2018 05:58:16.212 [0x815ed9000] ERROR - Throttle: timed out trying to read chunk 26
Jun 07, 2018 05:58:17.182 [0x80bb2ba00] ERROR - Throttle: timed out trying to read chunk 23
Jun 07, 2018 05:58:19.419 [0x80bb06d00] ERROR - Throttle: timed out trying to read chunk 35
Jun 07, 2018 05:58:21.170 [0x80cc3c700] ERROR - Throttle: timed out trying to read chunk 42
…
…
…
Jun 07, 2018 05:59:44.448 [0x80b224000] ERROR - Throttle: timed out trying to read chunk 29
Jun 07, 2018 05:59:45.799 [0x80ce2a500] ERROR - Throttle: timed out trying to read chunk 13
Jun 07, 2018 05:59:47.348 [0x80cc29900] ERROR - Throttle: timed out trying to read chunk 23
Jun 07, 2018 05:59:49.048 [0x815fd2600] ERROR - Throttle: timed out trying to read chunk 25
Jun 07, 2018 05:59:50.372 [0x80cc8f300] ERROR - Throttle: timed out trying to read chunk 10
Jun 07, 2018 05:59:52.293 [0x80c32f200] ERROR - Throttle: timed out trying to read chunk 29
Jun 07, 2018 05:59:53.094 [0x815ed9000] ERROR - Throttle: timed out trying to read chunk 12
Jun 07, 2018 05:59:54.942 [0x80bb2ba00] ERROR - Throttle: timed out trying to read chunk 31
Jun 07, 2018 05:59:56.689 [0x80bb06d00] ERROR - Throttle: timed out trying to read chunk 32
Jun 07, 2018 05:59:57.769 [0x80cc3c700] ERROR - Throttle: timed out trying to read chunk 12
Jun 07, 2018 05:59:59.870 [0x80cc3a900] ERROR - Throttle: timed out trying to read chunk 27
Jun 07, 2018 06:00:01.934 [0x80b122400] ERROR - Throttle: timed out trying to read chunk 26
Jun 07, 2018 06:00:32.317 [0x80cc3cc00] ERROR - Failed to delete session directory (boost::filesystem::remove: No such file or directory: “/var/db/plexdata/Plex Media Server/Cache/Transcode/Sessions/plex-transcode-ab3eb00c-2744-482e-bc82-5a31fe7b398b-2499fa9c-6240-4b74-8ee0-f7ee4b5d7dc4/chunk-00005”)
Thanks xlr23.
I have decided to create a transcoded library of my music at 320 bps. Not quite as good as FLAC and more of a pain to manage keeping the FLAC and the MP3 versions in sync. I haven’t found any really good software to do this for me. Using something called FlacSquisher that will clone the directory structure and generate MP3s for all the FLACs. But it is not fully capable for things like noticing when a FLAC is changed or deleted and cannot manage the other files in my library.
Wait Plex cant trans code FLAC and this bug has been around for more than a year ?! Wtf plex devs, at least respond.
I use itunes, so I convert my FLAC to ALAC which are both lossless (practically the same) and dont have any problems, you guys may want to try that.
No. Plex can transcode Flac. The bug is that there is a setting in the Android app to set a max bitrate level for music and that setting isn’t being observed. That bug has nothing to do with Aelxa.
Amazon devices support FLAC so they should just direct play. If it doesn’t play, it’s related to something else and nothing to do with transcoding.
You say it’s an Android app program that’s the problem, where is this app, I use Windows 7 Pro for Plex Media Server and Ultimate Ears Blast with Alexa as my portable speaker. No Android app and Plex will not play any of my FLAC files unless except through Computer speakers. So if your a Plex Team Member have you been able to make this work.
Sorry, my reference to the Android app was in regard to transcoding FLAC asked by XenAdmin. This has nothing to do with your issue with Alexa.
The Ultimate Ears Blast is a 3rd party device with Alexa support, not an official Amazon device. We have not tested our Plex skill with 3rd party devices. Please try again, then PM me your email address assigned to your Alexa account along with the time and name of the song you tried to play. I will check with the devs to see if they receive any type of error.
Hi, I have a similar issue with playing flac files via an Amazon Echo (2nd Gen) but for me it will play one song and then stop through the next one in the album.
It works perfectly when the album has tracks in mp3 format.
All albums (flac & mp3) work perfectly through the web interface.
I can ask Alexa to resume the track and it will do so but then stops again on the next track.
Plex Media Server app 1.13.0.023( 2018/07/05 ) on QNAP TS-253A NAS
- QPKG version 1.13.0.023
- Plex Media Server version 1.13.0.5023
I’d attach the PMS logs but as a new user, i’m blocked from doing so.
There was another thread that seemed to suggest the issue was fixed in Feb, but it hasn’t worked for me and its getting annoying having to have the albums in mp3 rather than flac.
Hopefully this can be fixed and QNAP given a poke to get it out to users.
Thanks in advance.
I went with running Ubuntu in a VM in FreeNAS rather than using the plug-in on a jail. Now I do get my flac files transcoded, some small glitches still (if the transcode fails for some reason, it can get stuck on the same song). Also I get to have premium music libraries and Over The Air television. It is too bad that FreeBSD is so poorly supported.
