A friend tried Plexamp against my music collection today and it was the first time it was used. I don’t use Plexamp personally.
I noticed 2 things:
I could not kill his session. Unlike videos, there is no kill switch. Why is that?
He was streaming a FLAC music file from me which is 8Mb/s. That’s the max I allow from my 10Mb ISP connection. Rarely do friends who watch remote movies from me hit 8Mb but here is taking all my bandwidth with a single music stream!!
I don’t see a way to adjust the maximum allowed for JUST music streaming. Nor do I see a parameter to force compression to MP3 or similar. This is needed ASAP.
Plexamp is technically not streaming. It is downloading the whole file. With default settings, it is usually even downloading up to 15 tracks in advance. That’s why you see the bandwidth spiking to the maximum allowed after playback has been initiated. And that’s why you can’t abort the “stream” - because there is none.
But it also means that after Plexamp has cached all those tracks, it will use no more of your upstream bandwidth until the currently playing track is finished and it will cache the next track in advance.
You can only ask the user to lower his quality settings in Plexamp to always use 128kbps opus format – no matter whether he is on WiFi or mobile data.
But keep also in mind that you will only see these spikes for a short time. Always after a new album/playlist/radio has been started. But they will subside relatively quickly.
And if you have already a different stream going from your server (e.g. a video stream) then Plexamp will only be allowed to use what’s left of the “bandwidth budget”.
I’ll have to test that, whether the bandwidth goes down after the album is downloaded, but it didn’t appear to be true. It stayed at my 8mb maximum the whole time. Also I had my friend test a video play at the same time to see if the plexamp stream would change and it did not. What happened instead was the video was compressed to only 2mb. Normally its higher than that.
Nevertheless my point stands. How it works now is irrelevant to the fact it should NOT work that way. What ends up happening is I have no way to stop it, so a single user can usurp all the bandwidth I allocated to remote Plex users.
