Plex Music Will Not Play – FIXED in 5 easy steps

So, for the past few weeks I’ve been experiencing something of an annoyance with my Plex Music library. Not the library specifically, but whichever app I use to play my music, a lot of it was just not playing. Plex Music will not play some tracks despite the fact that it used to.

Sometimes it would play but would stutter a lot. Other times, it just wouldn’t play at all. The progress bar across the bottom would often show the progress as being mostly finished, but no song had played. Just silence.

On some songs the progress bar didn’t show any progress at all, but the song would look like it was going to start playing, but never actually did. Indeed, the progress bar would get to 5-10 seconds into the song and then drop straight back to the beginning. Over and over again.

Plex Transcoding Error?

Everything I found online through Bing or Google searches led me to believe that it was a transcoding error – although there was no evidence that was the case in the logs. Nevertheless, I tried switching off hardware transcoding. No dice. I changed the transcoder path. No difference. I changed the transcoding speed versus quality settings. No change there either. Whatever I did with the transcoder didn’t fix the problem.

I thought it was just a bug that must have been introduced with the latest Plex update. It seemed to coincide with a recent update. But I couldn’t put my finger on it. And my library had grown significantly recently, so the possibility of something else I’d done was high.

Found It In The End

So after a bit of messing around I decided to turn off the Store Track Progress in the Library section for my Music.

Problem solved.

I’m not sure why you’d want to store track progress for a song to be fair – but then it’s possible that AudioBooks or something similar might be in your library too. If you’re part way through an audio book it would be handy to start again where you left off.

Nevertheless, I only have music tracks in this library and storing track position presumably is a bit broken. It seems that Plex is storing the end position when you’ve listened to a song. So listening once is possible. But more than once is not possible.

Interestingly, even rewinding the song to the beginning manually did not allow it to play. But switching off Store Track Progress sorted it.

So, if Plex music will not play then follow the instructions below to switch off storing track progress.

How To Switch Off Storing Of Track Progress

This setting is a library setting, so it has to be done on the server. You’ll need administrator access to your Plex server.

Login to your Plex account, and choose Launch to go to the server you wish to meddle with.

Choose Settings icon in the top right.

Choose Libraries on the left

Find your music library. Choose Edit

Scroll down the popup screen a little bit until you find the checkbox marked Store Track Progress. If there’s a checkmark in that box then take it out and click Save Changes.

If there’s no checkmark in there then I’m afraid there’s some other reason your Plex music will not play and you might have to continue searching.

Please let me know if you found this helpful by leaving a comment below.