On the Plexamp app, you have the ability to adjust ‘Streaming Quality’ of audio in the ‘Playback’ options. This is a great feature but only applies to streaming on a remote network or when on cellular.
I use a VPN to connect to my home network and stream my music using Plexamp. This means if I am ever using sub-par WiFi outside of my home, I sometimes don’t have enough bandwidth to stream my lossless music files. For example, when travelling and using public or hotel WiFi.
Being able to set quality when connected locally (or in my case via a VPN) would be fantastic.
The situation is the same in Plex itself, I just love Plexamp. If it existed in either app it would solve this problem for me.
It all depends on how the VPN is working. Some make your remote device appear as being directly within your home network.
Some do make it appear as being in a different network.
The transcoding setting in Plexamp will only apply to the latter case.
@OttoKerner My VPN is set up so I can access various things remotely. Home Assistant, pfSense, Plex etc. I think as far as the Plex/Plexamp app understands, I am on my local network in this situation, therefore it defaults to max quality so long as it detects a WiFi connection on my device.
If I am out and about, connected to the VPN on a cellular connection, the app uses the ‘Cellular’ setting, which is perfect.
I was recently on holiday in a place with slow internet over WiFi, which revealed how useful this feature would have been in this situation.
I realise this is probably a fringe use case, as most people probably set up Plex Remote Access. But I thought I’d ask in the off-chance anyone else is in the same boat.
I would also like to have the ability to set the streaming quality for WiFi on my local network but I have a different use case from others here.
I run Plexamp on the Android head unit in my car. I do not have a SIM in this unit, so no cellular connection. Mostly I use downloaded playlists that I download when over WiFi before driving (or I can hotspot to my phone when needed). This all works great.
The issue I have is that sometimes I will start playing a non-downloaded playlist while connected to WiFi, which caches a few tracks, as per my cache settings, to allow enough playtime for short trips around town. This works great on remote networks where I have lower quality settings to transcode to smaller streamed/cached files sizes. However when I am on my local network (at home) before driving it starts to cache non-transcoded (FLAC) files. Due to their large size, caching more than a track or two takes longer than I am prepared to wait. Also, I only have set a moderate cache size limit, so there is only space to cache a few tracks if they are not transcoded down.
Having a “WiFi Local streaming quality” setting would be very useful.
As an additional observation, it appears that when I start playing on my local network Plexamp queues a number of tracks in their original FLAC format. If I then leave the WiFi network before the cache queue has been downloaded, and then connect the car head unit to my phone’s WiFi hotspot, Plexamp on the head unit continues downloading the tracks to the cache in FLAC format, consuming significant bandwidth of my phone’s data plan.
