Roughly one year ago, I wrote some thoughts about music.1 Shortly thereafter, I finally paid for PLex Pass. I had asked Mike and Tom if it was decent and they seemed a bit on the fence; if I didn’t have a big Plex collection, it probably wasn’t worth. I broke down and bought the lifetime version to fix some annoyance I was having.2
Little did I know, Plex Pass gives you access to Plexamp, a music playing app. Plexamp plays music files in your Plex library and will stream to your phone if you are away from home. It has some nice features like per output device EQ and nice metadata display, if you are into that. But otherwise, seems like just another music app. Big deal.
The killer feature though is the sonic analysis. This takes forever on a big library, but once it’s done, Plexamp can ‘autoplay’ music in your library keeping to a similar genre or sound. It’s much like any of the algorithmic playlist features on Spotify and the like, but it’s for your music. It also enables rotating playlists made up of a few similar artists, so you always something kind of fresh. Obviously, on small libraries, this probably isn’t that great, but on mine (around 1700 albums), it’s pretty cool. If you have a Tidal subscription, there are certain autoplay lists that will also mix in music that you don’t have in your collection.
The other great feature is that it can cast from your Plex server to other endpoints, like Airplay, Sonos speakers, or other Plexamp installs. I have a raspberry pi headphone setup running Plexamp by the couch. I can play music from the server to the pi, while using my phone as a remote browser. It’s pretty reliable and seamless.
I highly recommend Plexamp for the few of us who still have large music libraries. I’ve tried a bunch of different apps on the phone that all have some nice features, but Plexamp seems like the most comprehensive and polished of them if you are willing to break away from the Apple Music paradigm. While I still use Apple Music (quite a lot actually), Plexamp is pretty low commitment since it uses a server as the hub. A server I’m already running.3 It also stacks up quite nicely against apps like Roon. Roon does have some attractive features but it also has a MASSIVE price. I’ve played around with the demo and am not really tempted.
It’s weird to me that Plex is sinking money into this niche app while at the same time slowly ruining their mainstream app by pushing weird social sharing shit and live TV, features that no one wants. But here we are.
- Time for my yearly blog post, the one I write during vacation around the holidays. I’m 3 days early this year, as the last two years I posted on 12/23. ↩
- Software subscriptions really annoy me. I almost always buy the ‘lifetime’ version if I can. ↩
- I have Plex pointed to the same location where my Apple Music library resides, so no files are duplicated. ↩
Good to know; I’ve been frustrated with Apple Music of late.
I’ve been using Plex for something like 12 years at this point, to the effect that I consider going to an alternative every now and then. And, every time Plex Pass goes on sale, inevitably someone sends me the sale link and I ask them “I’m looking through the features…what does this do that I can’t get currently?” They say ‘idk’ and I go about my way.
This post changed my view. I don’t use any music streaming services(1), but my wife has Spotify linked to her phone and it doesn’t appeal to me. So, I’ve got a collection of .ogg/.mp3s that I lug around and sync between devices. It’s gotten a bit old to manage.
Next time Plex Pass lifetime goes on sale, I’ll pick it up.
(1. I guess I could stream from Bandcamp, but nah….)