Why no support for 5.1 surround music playback?

Plex Players Streaming Devices
,
21

OK, so I can certainly understand not wanting to rig up a desktop in every room. That’s fair enough, but do you really want the ability to do this in every room? That implies you have surround sound in every room! Pretty impressive!

Again, fair enough… However that’s every piece of technology you have ever tried to use… I am aware that you don’t want to rig up a desktop in the living room, but that appears to be a piece of technology that you haven’t yet tried. And in fact you might be rather surprised at just how well PMP performs overall.

Anyways, you now know the limitations of the products you have tied to use, and have been given some alternative suggestions… I guess it’s now up to you as to how you wish to proceed.

Cheers :smiley:

22

You’re suggesting PMP, which as I understand it is a desktop media player, while recognizing that I don’t want to rig up a desktop in every room. Am I missing something here?

23

Nope, you’re not missing anything… It is indeed a desktop based Plex product, that works particularly well on a big screen, and just so happens to be able to play multi-channel audio, when the Firestick doesn’t. Just about covers it.

You are trying to find a solution for “every” room. And as it stands, that may only be a desktop! Although I have no idea about the AppletTV, or the Roku, or game consoles, or the Shield… They may work, but I guess you’d have to either try them or ask others on the forum if they are aware of the capabilities of those products.

24

Just want to say I to have a 2018 model Denon. So its worth noting that it can not playback any multichannel audio on its own. e.g. via a USB / External USB HDD via the built in Heos Media player.

Now this is picking on Plex, but could someone please tell me why other “Servers” Microsoft, Kodi, or Plex seem to have no problems with Multichannel sound but, Plex has?

This really isn’t just down to the fact that Plex would rather take a 30% cut off Tidal now would it? Cause if I remember reading about Tidal just kinda happens to specialize in that part of the steaming market. Problem is my little Denon is not MQA certified and will make no use of the “superior” quality because MQA Decoders which are NOT PC (i.e. USB Stick based), cost more then I’m ever willing to afford.

So hopefully come a few years down the road when that deal expires. Would you kindly give us the function to play back SACD Rips in 5.1?

Thanks…

P.s. I know Plex has plenty a mouth to stuff… So as with everything else you’ve done. (Sans bore us with stuff not even fit for MST3k. Even if it’s free trash. It’s still trash.), you could even make this an exclusive Plex Pass Perk.

25

Interestingly, 5.1 music/audio playback works on my old Roku, but not my new Shield.

So Plex can do it, but for some reason it’s not supported on the AndroidTV app version.

26

I am in the same boat as the original poster, streaming multichannel audio from my PLEX server to other non-PC equipped rooms in my hours (such as my home theater). PLEX used to play by my surround audio files just fine. After testing that this worked, I spent many days/weeks archiving my surround music catalogue into a digital format to stream to other rooms in my house using PLEX. Then I updated to the most recent version of the PLEX server this summer, and after that I found, as mentioned by the original poster, the playback was just the front 2 channels. So after a bunch of trouble-shooting and rigmarole, I found that if I reverted to a previous version of the PLEX server ( 1.15.2.793 from March of 2019 is the version that I settled on), playback of multichannel audio was just fine. And I’ve been happy ever since. That is until today, when I got an email letting me know that starting soon, devices will require at least version 1.18 of the PLEX server.

So PLEX absolutely used to have it the ability to play multichannel music files, and now they have phased it out. I do not understand it.

27

Could someone at Plex team comment on this?

Neither Shield or Apple TV, the best streaming boxes on Android and Apple ecosystems respectively, support multichannel music. So I have to resort to Kodi and PlexKodiConnect on Shield if I want to listen to multichannel music. Plex app on Shield can play pretty much everything else, how is this overlooked?

1 Like
28

It’s not just that, it’s probably not even playing back your regular music files at their original bit depth and sample rate. I have the same issue. It’s because it doesn’t even recognize hdmi passthru capabilities for music.

29

I used to be a big Android and Kodi user. As much as I like to tinker with things, I got bored of it and just wanted things to work and be more simple, so I switched to Apple and Plex a few years back.

This issue with Plex not supporting multi-channel audio (and maybe high res music according to some) is a huge bummer. I have taken a lot of time to rip all my Surround sound Blu-ray’s and DVDs, and it was a huge bummer that Plex doesn’t support this relatively basic request to pass-through multichannel music files. I can take an .m4a file with Atmos metadata, and change the extension to .mp4 and play it as a video, and pass-through works fine. Why is Plex neutering the music side of things? Is it a simple explanation like “sorry, this is a niche request that is a concern of an insignificant percentage of our users, so sorry we are not going to dedicate the resources to fix it” type thing or is there another explanation? Either way, please let us know. Or at least give us a wink that the fore mentioned explanation is correct.

EDIT: To clarify, I use a Shield, and it’s only purpose is Plex because of pass-through support. I realize the no pass-through support on Apple TV isn’t a Plex shortcoming.

4 Likes
30

Just reading through thread…
Pretty much frustrated with Plex running on an Nvidia Shield…

I have a lot of multi-channel DSD and flac files.

like you I just want the darn thing to work now I’m done tinkering with it for a long time…

Plex really for the video side of things I believe or if you don’t care about codex and an audio.
.
I hate that I have to go to a OS from Apple to get the audio side of things stable…

Thank you

31

Joining in as well! hopefully someone at Plex is reading this!
I’d like as well to be able to stream my multichannel audio files via my nvidia shield.

32

Just replying here to keep this thread open. Surround music should be played as surround or passed through just like other media. Shameful that it’s still messed up after so long.

It’s so frustrating that Plex seems to have stopped improving anything in their audio engine. All these useless cloud “features” that are utterly useless to most of us, but looks good to a CTO because of social media revenue stream optimization synergies or whatever. Umm, we loved Plex because it played OUR media correctly. Now it can’t even do that in more and more cases. Go back to the basics, Plex! PLEASE.

2 Likes
33

Glad to see I’m not the only one frustrated. While I’m working on installing speakers into my ceiling to get Dolby Atmos going in here, plex still can’t handle 5.1, which has been a standard for decades now. Absolutely ridiculous! I’ve given up on garbage like this for serious music playback at this point, and after many times of finding myself saying “why can’t this just work more like a computer?”, decided to hook up a mini PC with hdmi to the receiver. With foobar on it, I can playback anything, from flac, to dvd-audio iso images, to sacd iso images. Sure, I have to keep a wireless mouse and keyboard on the coffee table…but finally, something that just works.

34

you certainly aren’t the only one. seems strange that while we moved to 5.1, 7.1, and now base layer and height AND IT WORKS FINE FOR VIDEO that even basic multichannel flac files can’t be played. And never an explanation. you just have to search every few months hoping for a solution

Any favorite players widely available on Sheild, FireTV, AppleTV, Roku??

35

Logitech makes a little wireless keyboard with a trackpad on it for pretty much this exact purpose.
Otherwise personally I’ve been using Musicbee as a media player since I hate how Foobar looks. Don’t know if it does .iso, but it does 6 channel .ogg and .flac flawlessly.

Plex hasn’t seemed to touch anything from the music side in a very long time. It does a lot of things just… wrong. I just got my dad a 5.1 system and tried to show him some multichannel albums only to discover that Plex doesn’t support it at all, and apparently downsamples .flac files which leads to buffering. What’s even the point of using the music section in Plex? Did they get random usage feedback data that shows no one uses the music portion? Maybe people don’t use it because it sucks and it’s broken. There’s no logical reasoning behind any of the shortcomings for the music player segment of the app.

36

Yep I agree with all here, I’ve been disappointed with the “new” Plex music player since it was added! It’s so bad I just don’t use it anymore! If they fixed the play back of hi-res audio I’d happily use it again!

37

For what it’s worth, I had the same issue with both the Amazon FireSticks and Amazon Fire TV Cube devices. I have 30K albums in my Plex Music library and have no problems playing back files at 5.1, 7.1 or 7.2 file formats on the PS4, PS5 or AppleTV devices. It seems as though your issues are isolated to the Android devices that you are seemingly unwilling to migrate from. The limitation that you are describing has nothing to do with Plex.

38

Well, some Android TV devices (like the shield) do support multichannel HRA, but it’s on the apps to utilize it.

Apparently Plex must work around the standard Android MediaCodec limitations used by exoplayer. Exoplayer supports this customization, but it puts heavy development burden on Plex’s Android team. If you browse the Android TV/Android mobile tagged issues, you’ll see there’s a lot more pressing issues regarding more common use cases.

It is a Plex issue, but it is most definitely a feature request, not a bug.

39

@BigWheel this is pretty frustrating. I just got an Nvidia Shield Tv specifically because of the fact that it supports pretty much every major audio/video format… really disappointing that I can’t use Plex for multichannel music.

I’m going to have to enable the DLNA server on Plex, but this is a bandaid rather than a solution because now I lose out on the rest of the benefits of having a unified media library in Plex.

40

For those with the nVidia Shield TV or Shield TV Pro, (@joshfee_gmail.com, @FlaTechNole21, @jlm86, @bee_ryan, @TheShuriken ), this issue is actually an Android issue (or rather an issue of devices not being updated to Android 10+) and not Plex. Music is handled differently from video on Android and prior to Android 10 it only support stereo music at a maximum of 16 bit depth and multiples of 48kHz.

What’s more is especially if you’re talking about nVidia, they don’t even recognize that people want this feature. They even denied that upgrading to 10 would even fix the issue even though I provided them with documentation to the contrary in a now-deleted post on the Shield TV forums.

If you want this fixed, talk to nVidia. It’s not even just surround music, it’s all high-rez music, including DSD.

There’s a lot of things I’m frustrated with Plex about, but this one ain’t their fault.

They could write their own decoder or use another like Kodi, but you’ll get better results with the new Android audio subsystem than you will with most third party decoders. Also Plex has limited developers and $$$ and that stuff ain’t free, especially if you’re talking about DTS or Dolby formats where there are patents and proprietary formats. Yes there may be some FOSS decoders, but they don’t always handle all the formats correctly. And it’s not just so easy to completely rebuild their music playback system to incorporate their own decoder, especially when they would need to do it just for Android or roll it out to all devices and then they’d have to maintain basically a separate code fork… It’s just not really feasible with all the devices they support.

Enby has this same issue too.

I have been down this rabbit hole for a few minutes, but apparently nVidia thinks nobody wants to upgrade to the newest Android, and I’m banned now for calling them out for their developers downvoting criticism on their forums and for calling them out on adding support for Control4 which is a pretty esoteric and very expensive home automation solution instead of hi-res audio. Which they then said was because many many more people had requested it over hi-res or multichannel audio (which I call BS on, but whatever). So I did as much as I could. If you want it fixed, go there and make sure they’re aware that it’s not just me wanting that feature.

For non nVidia users… do the same with the manufacturer of your device.

Of course if that doesn’t fix it, then Plex may actually have something to look into, but until then, Plex devs can’t do a whole lot. Read the full thread I linked previously…

Also, if you want nVidia to do anything, you need to contact their support and their forums. Also their support will likely tell you that they do support it, but then they’ll link you to a support page that says they play back SOURCES in multichannel or hi-res, but it may play those sources, it does not play them back at original quality or number of channels.

You can share this post with them: https://source.android.com/devices/audio/highres-effects
Which they may say that 10 isn’t available for Android TV yet (yes, they told me that too), so I provided them with this: Android 10 on Android TV launched, new developer-only streamer, too