"No playable items found" error when playing an artist

[Sawtaytoes]

What version of Music Assistant has the issue?

2.4.2

Have you tried everything in the Troubleshooting FAQ and reviewed the Open and Closed Issues and Discussions to resolve this yourself?

• Yes

The problem

I'm having issues with Music Assistant when trying to play an artist. I clicked on the "Play" button, and it says "no playable items found" in a toast message. This is the same error I get when running an automation:

This artist has a bunch of albums, but Music Assistant isn't playing any tracks in those albums.

If I click "Play" on an individual album, it plays songs in that album, but that's not the functionality I'm after. Artists have "Play" buttons, so I want to use those.

My ultimate goal is to use an automation to play an artist's "Radio" using Music Assistant.

Is there anything I can do to fix this issue?

How to reproduce

1. Have the Plex Provider set up in Music Assistant.
2. Look up an artist in Music Assistant that's set up with Plex.
3. Click "Play".
4. It will error: "No playable items found".

Music Providers

I only use Plex:

Player Providers

As far as I know, I'm only using Chromecast. The devices I cast to are Chromecast devices:

Full log output

music-assistant.log

Additional information

I forgot to note, while I was messing around with this, I clicked "Synchronize now" on the Plex provider:

And then I noticed the Server Information area saying I had 0 tracks (what?):

Tracks are appearing if I go down into an album, and they play just fine too:

The issue occurs from both the Music Assistant Web UI and from an automation.

1. If I click "Play" on an Artist in the Plex Web UI, it works fine.
2. If I try to play music from an artist using regular Home Assistant media_player.play, it works fine, but there's no way to randomlize the song played, so I figured this would be a great time to try Music Assistant in Automations (I've been wanting to).

What version of Home Assistant Core are your running

2025.2.5

What type of installation are you running?

Home Assistant OS

On what type of hardware are you running?

Raspberry Pi

[OzGav]

Are any of the tracks of those albums in the library? In that last image none of them are. What option is selected when playing an Artist in MA SETTINGS >> CORE >> PLAYER QUEUES CONTROLLER

Edit: Actually I see you have zero tracks in the library. So that is why. There is no dedicated dev for Plex. I recommend you use the local file system provider instead

edit: You could also change the setting in the player queues controller to play all items from all providers

[Sawtaytoes]

These should be on the defaults:

I'm not seeing anything that needs changing from what you noted.

Also, that sucks there's no Plex support. Is this JavaScript? I might be able to fix the track-count issue myself.

[OzGav]

No it is Python. Change the top option to "All tracks from all providers"

[Sawtaytoes]

That worked! 🎉 It's pretty laggy using Music Assitant rather than the default Home Assistant music player, but it does exactly what I want, and I can use plaintext lookups without having to find IDs or use complicated URIs! 👍

Why did that not work with the default? Because Plex doesn't have "Top" songs or the Plex provider doesn't use it?

Curious, if I use the Filesystem Provider, that seems like a lot of server load for my Raspberry Pi to have it duplicate what Plex is doing. Plex is running on the server itself, so it's all local. The Raspberry Pi has to use Samba, and there's a ton of content for it to keep up-to-date.

[OzGav]

Yes I would say Plex doesn't return TOP tracks when requested. I still recommend you switch to using the local provider unless you have some particular use case. Yes it is going to take quite a while to index initially but after that it is fast as MA just scans for the changes. MA uses plain text for URIs normally. All I would say is make sure your files are properly tagged and in a typical directory structure. All the info is here https://www.music-assistant.io/music-providers/filesystem/

[Sawtaytoes]

Since it's working, I was thinking against using the Filesystem Provider, but if the Plex Provider isn't supported, it could randomly break one day too.

Also, none of my 24-bit tracks are loading with the Plex Provider, so that's another knock against it. If an album has 24-bit or higher, it only loads the name in Music Assistant, but clicking it gets another error.

So this might be a good opportunity to switch providers.

One issue is maintaining tracks in 2 systems now. I have a ton of indie tracks that are hard to find in Picard, so I simply don't have good tagged info on them. Those ones suck to maintain. VGMdb should handle them. Is that available in Music Assistant?

[OzGav]

Have not heard of VGMdb so no would be the answer. Just make sure they are tagged with track name, artist, album artist, and album name and are placed in a the typical folder structure and MA will still import them based on that.

edit: You can use MP3Tag to do basic tagging, I think you will find that easier

[marcelveldt]

Maybe if we can gather all known issues with the Plex provider I could spend something like half a day or so try to fix them.
I don't use Plex for music myself (only for movies and tv shows, where it was intended for) but I could just add some music to my Plex server or setup a test server and find out what is fixable - I do know that the API is rather weird/limited so there is a chance that some stuff even is not fixable in a right way.