As a long time user of the now defunct MusicIP the announcement and arrival of Sonic Analysis has caused me to dive in and buy a Lifetime Plex Pass. I have a large music collection and if Sonic Analysis is anywhere as good as MusicIP was at generating fantastic perpetual playlists from seed songs, albums or moods I’m sure a lifetime plex pass is a good investment.
Before I dive in and kickoff sonic analysis, I’d like to ask a few questions:
firstly, is there a standalone command line tool that can do the analysis on/from any suitable pc on my LAN? If not at present, would consideration be given to releasing one?
does the analysis follow the audio file or does renaming or moving a file cause analysis to have to be redone?
can analysis carried out by the plex community be leveraged across the community, or is the analysis carried out locally only, regardless of how many times the exact same audio stream has been analysed by plex pass holders?
is it possible to store the results of the analysis in file tag which Plex Server can check for prior to kicking off analysis of a track that has previously been analysed but perhaps moved to a different folder or renamed?
Irrespective of metadata all audio files would be able to be uniquely identified by reference to a sha256 hash of the underlying audio stream, which should in turn enable Plex to build and leverage an audio analysis result set where the sha256 hash is the primary key. This would enable local analysis to be done only if a local file doesn’t have a corresponding sha256 hash in Plex’s central database, meaning the Plex community leverage and benefit from one another’s efforts.
It’d also solve any portability issues around renaming/moving files etc. And if that hash were written to a tag it’d obviate the need to ever have to redetermine it.
I just tested this by renaming the files in an album. Even though there was a metadata match before and after the renaming, Sonic Analysis started again.
It is a neat feature. Not sure it will meet your needs but I wouldn’t wait for Plex to make any big updates before you try it out.
Thanks. Tried it over the weekend, does a great job generating mixes, but overall the architecture and UI leaves me cold. Additionally, Plex is highly invasive from a privacy perspective - all roads lead back to their servers, and unnecessarily so. Much as I like what Sonic Analysis enables I don’t think I’ll be making much use of Plex or Plexamp for the foreseeable future.
I think the Sonic Analysis feature uses only your data to create the matches and mixes… but anything in your library is run through Plex for matching and metadata lookup, yes.
