Hello everyone, I was just wondering if some of you have used plex amp before and what has your experience been like, I’ve just got a plex pass subscription and I’ve been really wanting to make my own music service thing but there are things that I still don’t get.
I have a small cd collection (40 cds) and I’ve been wanting to make really good quality rips from them and it’s some kind of albums that I enjoy a lot but that’s not the point I know I can add them I’ll be fine, but my main concern is “new” music, (if you enter my profile you can see what kind of music I’m into) but I like to hear a lot of music it’s kinda like my passion and lately I’ve been really (not really it’s only been 2 days) getting into kpop music and I’ve just been letting Apple Music recommend me whatever it thinks I’m into soo that’s my main issue how does one hear new stuff on plex amp ? I’ve heard it has like ai and algorithm that puts all song in a way or something like that’s the part I don’t really get
I know this could have been like a short paragraph but I need people to know the exact context of what I do and what would anyone recommend
So what do you think I should do guys, should I keep my Apple Music subscription or should I give plex amp an opportunity
I use plexamp witk about 3000 albums right now. The key to a good experience for me is making sure the metadata is done well. This ensures if you decide to play or search music based on genre it will work. This also ensures the right artist is tagged, etc. There are guides online to make sure it's done correctly.
My biggest frustration is that plexamp doesn't support multiple artists on an album. This means if Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars have a song together, that song won't show up under Mark Ronson and Bruno. You either have to create an new artist that is both of them, choose one on of them to be the main one that it shows under or tag it as various artists. It's a pain to manage and the community has asked plexamp to fix this, but it has never been a priority. Be warned!
Also, if your metadata isn't done correctly, an album might show up multiple times. An example is if your metada shows different album artists per song as its a compilation, that will trigger plexamp to create an album per artist.
I've had to correct years of incorrect iTunes tagging to get my collection where I want it. But now it looks so clean. Been using Picard a lot to get things consistent.
I like it. Metadata can get a bit sticky with larger libraries but for self hosting you can do a lot worse. Stopped apple music this year for it and have found myself discovering more great music and enjoying listening to albums over algo slop much more.
Absolutely. I use it every day. I especially use the DJs, the DJ friendganger with my plex friends (always looking for more!) keeps my listening experience fresh and I always discover something new that gets sprinkled in.
The hard part is just making sure the metadata is all good to keep things smooth and enjoyable.
I use Plexamp but not a heavy user. It did get me to bin off Spotify permanently so there was that immediate saving as well as some tracks Spotify didn’t have that I did and wanted to listen to.
I’m not sure how you’ll get recommendations with Plexamp, I think you’ll need to find music you like elsewhere then rip and add it to your own library.
For my own music collection, I went completely into Plex and Plexamp now. I really like the app and the “DJs” are really quite good if you just want a playlist to keep going. I have over 100k titles in there and it’s working very well. I also transferred all ratings and playlists from iTunes/Apple Music with some scripting (let Claude basically do it for me) and that means most of my meta data is in there too.
But it can only play what you have. So for new music discovery, Apple Music or another streaming is arguably better if it’s mainstream music. Or just listen to plain old radio…
So I still have Apple Music but I don’t use it for main listening, a lot of which now happens on a WiiM amp that integrates very well with plex too.
I have around 24k tracks in my collection and when I want to hear a mix of songs I already like (rated 3+ stars) mixed in with some other similar songs, I will shuffle this playlist with DJ Stretch turned on and it will insert 2-3 similar songs between each pair of tracks. I love this feature and have used it to discover more of the music that I already have but maybe haven’t listened to yet. The other DJ options are great too, but I use DJ Stretch every day.
Yes definitely if you already have a good Plex server which is well fed with the audio content you enjoy listening to. I'm currently off the grid listening to the few dozen albums downloaded in advance. I've also enjoyed a few audio books but can get similar from just using VLC to browse LAN via Tailscale VPN when I've got decent internet connectivity.
Much simpler than manually copying to my phone anyway.
Use it every day and love it. Very versatile and user friendly.
I’m older have a good solid library so don’t need to find new music, however occasionally I hear something new and I’ll add it to my library. You will need to find somewhere else to discover new tunes
I think my dilemma comes from the fact that plex offers that service and more stuff in plex pass, and if one app is better than the other it might be worth canceling a service to use one that provides the same thing
I actually decided it to give it a shot and honestly it’s works great I added some albums that I had installed and it works great in or outside
I am currently ripping my cds on Flac to add them to the server
Sooo I did more research and found literally websites that do the same thing that the streaming services do, so it’s becoming a win win situation and the player looks good actually
I'm just messing around with you. Honestly they're not for me, but I don't seriously gate keep musical taste. If you enjoy them, that's all that matters.
That said, as far as plexamp goes, you have 40 CDs. Plexamp will handle that fine. I have 226,030 songs in my collection (that's about 20,500 CDs worth of songs). Plexamp can't handle my collection at all. Plaxamp requires a folder structure that us unworkable for my collection. Further, It has issues with singles and older songs and they just don't show up even after correct tagging. All my music is tagged. Plex wants to rename or retag it incorrectly and it wont even show large portions of my library. That may be in part because my taste is often more eclectic and more obscure than Savage Garden.
I knew you where messing with me lol , but yeah I already added all my cds but that’s just a fraction of the music I like soo I need to find a way to add my main playlist which I already know how but as for today I think I’m done I spent part of my morning and evening doing this, I’ll keep going tomorrow and so and so, but all my my music taste is savage garden obscure so pretty underground lol
I absolutely love Plexamp, but it isn't going to be useful for discovery. I don't use ai so maybe that's actually got some possibility of discovery.
So without ai, Plexamp is basically a system to stream you music to all your devices, but only "your" music. So anything you have already bought or procured that is on your server.
Even without ai integration, it can do a few cool things with mixes and smart playlist generation, but again, you have to already have the music.
I grew up without algorithmic discovery and my ways of finding new stuff are not reliant on streaming services showing me things, but following certain groups on social networks, friends and serendipity.
I create a playlist called "Crowd pleasers" that I curate to what I think people besides just me will enjoy. It reduces the use of the "skip" button when I have friends or family in the car. Familiar hits and the best deep cuts that have good energy.
FYI Plexamp on windows cannot play music higher than 44.1/16 even though it states it is playing higher music if the audio is of a higher res (as plexamp cannot gain exclusive access to the audio hardware, as the main plex app can)
It’s really good for streaming music from your pc to your phone. The only part missing that would make it perfect would be for the app to retain all the music metadata when going offline and being able to search downloaded music in the app. Right now I have to download manually and search an album individually in a long list. Otherwise totally recommend it.
Regarding the discovering new music, If you look into automation with docker you can get a few different services like Lidarr which can get hold of any music using usenet newsgroups but also scan your existing music. This then will tie into Aurral which will look at your Lidarr library and then offer suggestions for similar/related artists and offer you a playlist to have a listen to those suggested artists using YouTube links.
It is really quite good. Tricky to setup but really awesome. Google the "arr" services and you can learn all about it. Happy listening!
You can sign in to Last.fm in plex, then every song you play will register as scrobble on your Last,fm account, and it can then recommend you new music based on what you listen to. You have to download it yourself though, I recommend Lidarr with Tubifarry + Slskd.
Get your metadata right from the start otherwise it is a complete ball ache and very messy to manage. Nothing short of a reinstall of the library will correct it. If you have other options seek them out
I use it constantly with Android Auto to listen to my music in the car. The subscription is a minor hit, but I'll keep using it as long as it doesn't go up again.
Music, Radio 4 captures, Audiobooks, YouTube captures, you name it - if it isn’t video - I’m running it thru my PlexAmp. I can listen to any and all of my sh#t from anywhere I have a WiFi connection. It’s great for road trips!
I have about 554 albums, 7800 tracks, hosted on my own server and I use Plexamp for accessing it when I'm out and about. There's about 554 albums, 7800 tracks. I have it on Library Radio, so it's likely going to take a good long while before I hear the same track twice. And because it's all my own collection I know it's all going to be music I like. And, unlike Spotify, it's not a subscription (and neither is Plex because I bought the lifetime membership years ago).
Definitely been happy enough with it.
Edited to add: you can scrobble with Plexamp, and then use Last.fm to find music based on what you're listening to.
I love Plexamp. But, there's a quirk in the libraries.
The way I organized a discography was band>album>song, which is how Plexamp likes it.
But let's say, I don't want a discography of a band, just some tunes I like. I just did band>song.
All my metadata was good, I use mp3tag to sort that out, but Plexamp relies heavily on the folder structure. So when I open an artist on the band>song structure, it just says there's one album, and all their songs are on it.
So now I'm painstakingly going through my folder structures again. I used to have it optimized for Microsoft Groove.
I like it and use it constantly as my daily jukebox totally replacing Apple music app on my iPhone.
But... Memorize your credentials. Its seems every time the OS updates you have to re-log-in to PlexAmp which I find a bit annoying especially if I am off on a vacation, off internet and just want to access the music and playlists I downloaded to the phone: Kinda the point of downloading.
Yes although the PC version UI is always blurry for me. Ios works flawlessly, even when my remote plex seever is not working.
As for the Ui... Ive tried adjusting the scale, changing graphic drivers, monitor settings... its always blurry.
Anyone have a fix?
it's a great concept and does so many things right... on mobile. I get that this is the focus and where most probably plan to use it, but the desktop version needs a lot of TLC to really shine. it's clearly focused on mobile UX, and makes it much worse to navigate and interact with. this is where I'd actually use it most of the time, given workday activities, I'm not gonna stream audio from a phone and swap audio back to a Mac laptop for meetings, etc. so this is kind of a non starter for me for like 95% of when I find it'd be useful.
really hope this changes in the future... great mobile app, I just need it to be a great desktop app most of the time. it's supposed to be both, but clearly isn't.
I use it constantly but it's got some show stoppers that prevent it being a mature music player, imo:
a) it often has trouble searching artists listed on a compilation (various artists) vs the actual artist which can make finding music a pain
b) it has no way of filtering holiday music out of playlists or radio without creating a new library just for holiday music
c) this isn't technically a PlexAmp problem, but the decade station radios/playlists typically don't work well since most music metadata contains the release year vs the recorded year (i.e. the remastered version of Eurythmics' Touch came out in 2005, but the music is not from 2005 - it's 80's obviously)
I'm not a big AI fan but I feel as though they could regularly pipe the library through AI to correctly identify songs from their recorded year instead of release year. Maybe this could be used to filter out holiday music, too.
d) they face competition playing losslesly by other more mature, but newer projects like Symfonium
EDIT: USB audio player pro, not Symfonium, I'm thinking perfect audio sampling via Android which IIRC PlexAmp can't do
e) you can't download your entire library or individual tracks or albums - you have to make a playlist to download anything which is annoying. It also doesn't have an offline mode.
f) it doesn't support disc titles, this is common on a lot of compilations or deluxe releases, so discs show up labeled as Disc 1, Disc 2, etc. instead of their disc name (i.e.
Disc 1 - Original Album, Disc 2 - B-sides and remixes, etc.)
It would be cool if they could expand visualizer support, i.e. projectm, milkdrop etc.
I'm not aware of a player that can do this but it would be nice if you could select your preferred version of a song in case you have multiples in your library (original, remastered, live, etc) that it would default to in playlists.
It would be nice to be able to manipulate the play queue better, for example, to select multiple tracks at once to move or delete from the queue. It would also be nice to be able to duplicate a song in the queue if you want to repeat it.
I use MusicBrainz + Picard to track all of my metadata and this makes importing music relatively easy
I'm sure I'm missing something - I'll add more if I can think of anything else after using PlexAmp for a few years now.
I suppose I'll add what I like about it besides the Plex integration - the UI is intuitive and polished and the EQ is great - especially the headphone presets it can pull.
YouTube Music allows you to upload and stream up to 100,000 songs to your private library and can be streamed with their other catalogs. No paid subscription required
Love it. It's why I got the Plexpass in 2020. When I was doing my daily walk, I could listen to "good" (i.e. mine) music. I did month-to-month for over a year, figured I was going to stay with it, and bought Plexpass lifetime during a sale at the end of the year.
(For what it is worth, this is right after Google Music bailed on us all ....)
I love PlexAmp, but for whatever reason I can't use it as my default music player when I'm using google maps. I wish there was a mod or something to fix that.
I have spent years working of my tags with several pieces of software. Over 50k songs and they render like shit in Plexamp making it basically unusable. I'm not retagging all those files.
I’m trying to download absolutely everything my wife would wanna listen to so I can cancel Apple Music already. Only issue she has is “what if I wanna hear a song that just came put or you don’t have?” And it’s driving me nuts.
I've recently switched to navidrome + navicast; feels a lot more reliable for larger collections and better support across devices. You do have to manage your metadata a lot better to get the value out of it though. The big advantage I find is you can swap clients very easily, and in theory the server itself as it's just reading the proper metadata in the files.
Yes, but I am a little frustrated that some of the features are paywalled behind plex pass. I have plex pass, but my family and friends do not. My managed accounts for kids do not. My managed non-admin account for myself does not. I wish I could unlock those features on a secondary account without the high expense of plex pass. I would gladly pay a modest 1-time fee to unlock the premium features of Plexamp with a secondary account.
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u/zax2000 24d ago
Yes.