Weird solution to Linux plexamp requiring many restarts before playing audio

Plex Labs
1

For some months now I have had an ongoing issue with Plexamp (v 4.12.4) on my Linux Mint desktop. It is on the same hardware/ OS that runs the Plex Media Server.

Basically, Plexamp initially will not play. The progress counter will advance one or two seconds and then drop back. I would close Plexamp and restart it. It might take just one restart or ten to get going. Sometimes it wouldn’t at all. It’s worth noting that the PMS web interface will play music, so I think a Plex Media Server related cause can be dismissed. (?)

Anyway, a few days ago I started looking for the Plexamp logs. (NB They are really well hidden. It’s to keep us on our toes, right?)

I didn’t see any errors, so thought let’s delete the log and start again so I can get a clean look. Did that and restarted Plexamp. Weirdly Plexamp played first time.

I’ve now repeated the above exercise many times. Demonstrably, if the current log file is in place Plexamp will not play. When I delete the log file and start or restart Plexamp it plays fine.

2

Now this is a fun report.

Have you tried putting an empty log file in there, with privs set so Plexamp cannot write to it?

3

I’ve had this same behavior. Found and removed the logs. But I ended up seeing some not authorized lines. So I logged out and back in. IDK if the tokens don’t stick around the same or something. Or if I had a different cause. Just thought I’d toss relogging as a possible solution.

4

I had similar thing happen a few days ago. Plexamp is on Fedora 43, gnome 49. Server is on MacOS. Plexamp would show playing 1 second from zero to 1 then drop back down to zero again. I had the web app opened at the same time, and watched the activity dashboard and the weird thing was that the activity dashboard showed the song was playing all the way through like normal. And onto the next song it did the same. Plexamp showed a new track but did the zero to 1 second thing for the whole track. So the server knew the song was playing like normal but plexamp was not. The fix for me was I force stopped the song from the activity dashboard on the server and then I selected a new song on Plexamp and it straightened itself out.

I haven’t been able to get this to happen again.

5

running into this regularly on Arch/Gnome 49, to the point where I set up a script to delete all the log files