A few bugs with Plexamp

[Neovov]

Hi gang,

First of all, many thanks for this awesome app. There is some really great ideas.

I noticed a few bugs or things-that-bothered-me-a-bit:

• Clicking “Library Radio” or “Time Travel Radio” always gives me the same two albums. I reckon that before Plexamp I rarely used the music features from Plex (nobody’s perfect!).
• When I do not know what to listen, I usually launch my whole library on shuffle mode until I stumble on an OK album. I haven’t found a way to do that with Plexamp.
• I have a lot of trouble bringing the app on the foreground. I almost always click on the tray icon (on mac OS) but it displays the menu. I end pressing shift+cmd+space but it shows me the search while I sometimes just want to see what I’m listening.
• The equalizer is really nice but when the music is really calm there is nothing displayed ; maybe always display 1px for each three bar?
• Recently played tracks doesn’t have their covers (just a grey square)
• One of frustrating thing with Plex’s music library is how multiple-CD albums are handled (or maybe I did something wrong). If I have a “Foo” album splitted in 4 CD, it will display 4 albums. In Plexamp, searching for “Foo” will gives 3 results only and we cannot click on “Album” to get the results of albums matching the “Foo” search.
• Sometimes when launching the app it takes times to connect to the server and I end up on a blurred image with no indication ; maybe a small message would be handy.
• Using Plexamp with a bad connection may be painful. Launching a track takes times but that’s OK. Seeking backward also takes times which seems to indicate there is no local cache. Playback may also stop because the buffer is empty.
• It is nice to be able to search for a genre but the results are rather strange: “Electro” gives me 3 results (with 96, 24 and 33 albums) and the “Genres” header seems clickable but nothing happens when clicking.
• The track’s spectrum may be prettier

On a more personal matter:

• I’d love to know how Plex compute the loudness of the tracks, the gapless information and what is the target LUFS.
• I’d love to hack it. I work at a music streaming company and I’d love to plug it to our catalog (this is not an official request, I’d just love to try for myself).

Keep up the good work and happy new year !

[solitaryreign]

To chime in into that multi disc album issue (@Neovov: do you use the discnumber tag? You should only find one entry regardless how many discs it has):
It seems that PlexAmp does not recognize the discnumber tag or just does not display that information at all. I would like to see albums separated by discnumber, something similar like PlexWeb just regained with its new update.

As for the loudness and LUFS part, take a look here (somewhere in the middle): Introducing Plexamp. As we mentioned on the blog post… | by Elan Feingold | Plex Labs | Medium

The server team has been working on enhancing the media analysis engine for audio. They use the best-in-class EBU R128 algorithm to extract loudness data and enable a wide range of new features. […] Plexamp uses the server-computed ReplayGain 2 values with -18 LUFS reference

[elan]

@Neovov said:
First of all, many thanks for this awesome app. There is some really great ideas.

Wow, thanks so much, and for the great comments, replies below.

• Clicking “Library Radio” or “Time Travel Radio” always gives me the same two albums. I reckon that before Plexamp I rarely used the music features from Plex (nobody’s perfect!).

This should rely on (among other things) the popularity setting being enabled in the agent (shown below). If it’s on, it’s possible you might benefit from refreshing metadata on your entire library.

• When I do not know what to listen, I usually launch my whole library on shuffle mode until I stumble on an OK album. I haven’t found a way to do that with Plexamp.

There is a way, it’s just not obvious:

• Make a smart playlist containing all tracks in your library.
• Search for it and then you can shuffle it.

It’s a bit roundabout, but it’s similar to a default playlist iTunes used to include, IIRC, and once you play it once it’ll show up in your recently used playlists right away.

• I have a lot of trouble bringing the app on the foreground. I almost always click on the tray icon (on mac OS) but it displays the menu. I end pressing shift+cmd+space but it shows me the search while I sometimes just want to see what I’m listening.

Let’s just say we’re working on improving that…

• The equalizer is really nice but when the music is really calm there is nothing displayed ; maybe always display 1px for each three bar?

The next version of the app improves the scaling of the spectrum (and run accelerated on the GPU, as a bonus) which might help that. Unless you mean the mini-spectrum, which might need its own scaling?

• Recently played tracks doesn’t have their covers (just a grey square)

It’s possible this is fixed, where exactly are you seeing this, and do the albums have artist/album art?

• One of frustrating thing with Plex’s music library is how multiple-CD albums are handled (or maybe I did something wrong). If I have a “Foo” album splitted in 4 CD, it will display 4 albums. In Plexamp, searching for “Foo” will gives 3 results only and we cannot click on “Album” to get the results of albums matching the “Foo” search.

Hmm, as far as I know that’s been fixed, but maybe you created your library ages ago? I have this two-disc album e.g. and when I search for it in Plexamp I get one result.

It is true that we don’t show the DISC X headers in Plexamp yet.

• Sometimes when launching the app it takes times to connect to the server and I end up on a blurred image with no indication ; maybe a small message would be handy.

Yeah, we’ve been lazy with error messages for the first release Anything special about the server which is slow? We do heavy caching of connections, etc.

• Using Plexamp with a bad connection may be painful. Launching a track takes times but that’s OK. Seeking backward also takes times which seems to indicate there is no local cache. Playback may also stop because the buffer is empty.

On our list to investigate

• It is nice to be able to search for a genre but the results are rather strange: “Electro” gives me 3 results (with 96, 24 and 33 albums) and the “Genres” header seems clickable but nothing happens when clicking.

This might be related to how your agent is setup (in the premium agent, at least, you have choices about how many genres to use). Clicking a genre should lead to a list of albums for that genre.

• The track’s spectrum may be prettier

Any specifics? Next version has better colors…

• I’d love to know how Plex compute the loudness of the tracks, the gapless information and what is the target LUFS.

We use -18 LUFS reference.