I like to have my music stored offline so as not to be at the whim of my mobile coverage, such as when I’m in the air, on the underground, or travelling to the country. I have enough storage on my phone to contain my entire library, especially if it’s been transcoded to Opus, and so that’s what I’d like to do. I’d even be happy if I could just download an entire playlist instead of a portion of it.
I understand I can currently sync up to 24 hours of music from a playlist, but if I’m taking a long-haul flight I’d rather not be restricted to what the Plexamp algorithm thought I’d want to listen to on my journey, as it can often be quite specific and unknowable in advance.
My mobile data plan is not that great so if I use plexamp a lot then my dataplan is not enough. Having an easy way to download songs to my device would be appreciated.
I think a similar suggestion has been brought up before and I think the devs said something along the lines of
-This app is mainly designed for listening via the cloud so offline features are a low priority.
But plexamp is so good that I think it’s time that it got more offline love.
What I would like to see is an option that lets me choose an amount of gb and that the app automatically download albums up to that amount of gb. I would be happy with a simple “download everything possible from A to Z” but in a perfect world some smart features would be nice to have as well. Maybe that it priorities my most listened to albums and newly added albums.
Absolutely true. Devs should understand that the main selling feature of Plexamp over Roon or other network players like LMS is the ‘taking songs with you’ feature. I think this offline feature shouldn’t be a low priority. At the very least, it should match the feature set of apps like Tidal, Spotify, etc for our own library.
One thing I find very annoying is if I mark a playlist to be downloaded and add a song to it later, the new songs are not downloaded automatically, unlike Tidal. These are a few things that are keeping me to use Plexamp exclusively.
It’s not about how much music I can listen to, it’s about the fact that I bought a phone with 256GB of storage so I could store my whole library offline so it’s always with me. The 24 hour limit on playlists seems completely arbitrary. Why can’t I choose unlimited?
E.g. I have several artists where I have way more than 24 hours of music and I want to be able to pick that artist and have the playlist randomly play across the whole artist, or pick a certain album. I shouldn’t have to make 2, 3 or 4 playlists to achieve ensuring that they’re all available offline.
There’s no reason for this to be a thing, please remove the unnecessary limit.
I’m right here with you guys. I have nearly 3TB of music that I’ve been using in iTunes (now Music) over the past 15+ years. I still sync my music manually to my phone like an iPod. I’ve been waiting to make the jump to Plexamp but like the rest of you I need to have more than 24 hours of music stored locally on my phone.
Thanks for moving your request here @ben_levine. It’s more likely to be noticed when in the correct thread.
It may not be exactly what you’re asking for, but I’d like to just mention two things that have been noted before:
The 24 hour limit is per-item. You can download as many albums, playlists, radios etc as you want, but each one is limited to 24 hours currently for performance reasons in the current implementation
A neat workaround is to use smart playlists with a filter to restrict to stuff you haven’t heard recently. The effect of this is the playlists become sliding snapshots of fresh music that will refresh from the server periodically as you listen to them. It’s almost like having your whole library with you.
As I say, it’s not the answer to the question you asked, but it may be a workable solution for you depending on your use case, at least until/if Plexamp gains longer limits for downloads
My question is, does plexamp use the same download mechanism as the newly added “Downloads” function in the main plex app for Android/iOS? If so, then “limited for performance reasons” doesn’t make much sense, at least with the current limits. The workaround for bypassing download limits on the main Plex app (create smart playlist with all music then download it) worked perfectly for me, roughly 2500 songs and it’s snappy with no issues on my OnePlus 7 Pro (admittedly a pretty powerful phone).
It’d be far better to recommend a limit for optimal performance across devices, but allow users to bypass it with a warning that their mileage may vary depending on their device and library size instead of hard capping it.
I hope it is sometime soon then. It’s the one missing feature that would make the main Plex app completely redundant for music. Thankfully there is caching in plexamp which helps mitigate this somewhat but ultimately it’s not the same.
I paid for plex pass just for plexamp, only to be slapped by this totally asinine restriction. First, data is very expensive in canada, so it’s not reasonable to stream everything. Secondly, most of the time I’m using plexamp I don’t even have cell service.
Currently I split my playlists into 24h and sync them but I will only let this bother me so long before I look for alternatives. It’s sad because plexamp is so good otherwise.
It’d be very good to be able to do this, especially given that media can be transcoded into a lower quality (and size) for listening on a mobile device.
Frankly, I expected this functionality with Plexamp.
+1 on this one, I have many smart playlists that are much longer than 24 hours in length and I would love to be able to fully sync them on my phone, we need this!
Being able to download your library or being able to access local files on my phone should be a standard feature. I once went overseas to China and trust me, access to internet beyond the Great Firewall is terrible. Fortunately I had an actual music player app so I could play my music during the month I was there. Plexamp not being able to grab your library or being allowed to use your phone’s internal storage for music already there is a great disservice. It’s fine if all the cool features are locked to the Plex server, but at least let us fall back to dumb playing capabilities if we have no internet. I have friends who (pre-pandemic) used to go back for an extended period every year or two, so there are real world use cases for being able to playback files manually downloaded to your phone or being able to sync your entire library to your phone.
I have to admit, this is an annoyance. I have certain playlists that are more than 24h and the work around for that would be to divide that into multiple playlists which then defeats the purpose of it being ONE playlist. For that reason I’m still using the Plex app for those playlists and Plexamp mostly for individual albums. Would be great if I could do it all in Plexamp though so +1 for this feature.
I have been chugging along with whatever the devs have said as Plex Amp is “limited” in the playlist area however once you’re offline, the PlexAmp app totally expects the user to know where a track or artist/band is located based only upon the playlist tab. Search is currently not usable while offline and it’s a drawback for future case scenarios if and when “full library” downloads get considered.
I too would like a way to download whole artists or libraries. The regular Plex Android app does not have any restrictions for Downloads, but its music play is utter garbage and cannot play a whole album without failing to move onto the next song when one has finished. PlexAmp seems to much more stable, but lacks basic features that I miss like being able to download exactly what I want instead of a limited set of songs at one time.
This is very true… I totally missed the fact that search does not work when offline since I have enabled the option to “Prefer downloaded media”. I’ve used PlexAmp while not connected to the internet a few times but only on shuffle so it didn’t present an issue with search. But It is definitely a missing feature, and an important one.
I use the 5 star system and then have dynamic playlists. My 5-Star playlist is the only one that’s under 24 hours, sitting at 21.5 hours. My 4-Star+ is over 4 days, 3-Star+ over 7 days. Sometimes I want a little more depth, and I can’t even download much more than the radio overplays with the current restriction.
And with the Sonic Analysis, I’ll honestly probably want to have the whole 3 star downloaded and run a sonically similar playlist for whatever song sounds good at the moment.
I couldn’t agree more. Why I can download via the plex app and not plexamp is ridiculous and makes Plexamp next to useless. Many of us don’t want to open up our servers to outside access due to security concerns.
