Playback is fixed

Songs have been failing with a "Playback failed" error — some died about a minute in, others broke the moment you skipped, and explicit tracks wouldn't start at all. Here's what was going on, and what changed.

Why it broke

To play music, Meld has to introduce itself to YouTube as a particular kind of device. The identities it was using had quietly stopped working: the ones YouTube used to accept got blocked, so everything fell through to an "iPhone" identity. And for that one, YouTube only hands over the first minute or so of a song before refusing the rest. That's why tracks died around the one-minute mark, and instantly when you jumped back to something you'd already started.

Explicit and age-restricted songs failed for a different reason. Those can only be played by a signed-in identity, and the piece of the app that unlocks them had been relying on data that stopped being updated back in July.

What's fixed

• Songs play all the way through, and skipping works again
• Explicit and age-restricted tracks play again
• Downloads that were failing for the same reason should work too
• When playback does fail, the app now tells you what actually went wrong instead of just "Unknown error"

If something still fails

Let us know which song it was and roughly how far in it stopped. That's usually enough for us to find it.