More than anything else in Plexamp, I would like to see the seamless integration of downloaded music into my regular albums and playlist folders. The fact that, in order to play music offline, I need to go to a downloaded music tab and scroll through the many dozens of albums and playlists I have saved in order to find what I am looking for is a huge disappointment.
I propose specifically,
An “offline” toggle that forces the library page to only display locally stored files. This would retain the ability to access the Albums, Artists, Playlists, and other pages and utilize their respective features, as opposed to the current system which eliminates all of that functionality.
This would be a huge win for those of us who like to download more than a couple of albums and playlists at a time.
Yes, I mistakenly assumed Plexamp would work like this. Offline music access via Plexamp was the top reason I bought Plex Pass and it was a major disappointment to see such a sloppy implementation of the download feature when I first loaded the app.
The offline toggle method works great in other self-hosted media players (e.g. Play:Sub on iOS) and I think it would be an ideal solution for Plexamp as well.
Yep, long ago the normal Plex app worked this way with the seamless integration. It was really nice.
I think it was a real regression when they changed the UI to separate online from offline content.
I imagine they did it to help people who were downloading video content because they had to be more mindful of storage limitations, but for us music people that’s not so much of a problem.
The lack of an offline mode has been a minor annoyance for me for a long time. Due to do covid-19 this hasn’t been a problem because I haven’t been able to travel.
Now with the world starting to open up and some international trips planned, an offline mode is really sorely needed:
In an overseas country and not wanting to incur data roaming charges
I completely agree. The offline downloads system is, in my opinion, the biggest remaining weakness for the app.
[Edit]
In my view we would ideally have a downloads system much like that of Spotify where your locally stored music is seamlessly integrated with the rest of your collection when you are connected and then, when you go offline, it becomes all you see. Again, much like Spotify, I think it would be a good idea to add some symbol next to downloaded content, just so we know at all times what exactly we have on our devices.
So with this on, I’m going to assume that I could play anything in my library and if there is a downloaded copy of that song, it will just play the downloaded copy?
In the above scenario, I have downloaded a playlist that I have created that would include that one song.
The devs keep saying that they’ll do it someday - yet it’s been many months (and from looking back on Reddit/forums, it’s been years). They say it isn’t a high priority because other features supposedly are. It’s currently the highest voted item for PlexAmp on this forum. Look at the App Store reviews. Many users keep asking for this. I love Plex, but this is really a pain point for me. I think this really comes down to the devs allocating a lot of time to rewrite whatever necessary to get this feature up and running.
The benefits of offline music cannot be overstated:
Battery life: playing music over cellular data or even Wi-Fi will consume a lot more battery than playing locally. If anyone remembers how it was with iPods, you could literally play music for hours on end. Sure, phones nowadays can handle the streaming, but when you’re doing a bunch of things besides music (especially other data related tasks) - every little bit of battery counts and adds up.
Cellular data: Not everyone has unlimited data. A lot of people have data caps - which will be eaten up a lot quicker when playing high quality music.
Ability to choose any song you want: Yes, I get it - we can download playlists and such up to 24 hours. But I literally can’t browse artists, albums, etc. when offline. Not everyone has 2.5TB of music, so being able to see all of my music and choose whatever I want whenever is a big deal.
Honestly, Plex (and Plexamp) should default into offline mode and enable online features once they’re fully loaded. It’s very annoying that every app / program on the planet now thinks that it needs Internet just to launch. It almost makes you wish for the days of portable CD or MP3 players.
This NEEDS to be seamless. If I browse my library and play something that I have already downloaded for offline it should play the already downloaded file.
I only recently realized that Downloads don’t work the way they should. While at home and on WiFi I would “Download” things that I’m going to be playing a lot while I’m out. Apparently I’ve used way more mobile data these past few months and it turns out it’s because I didn’t specifically play that music FROM the Downloads tab.
Curious then how Plexamp used 2.48GB of data in 6 days when all I play is media that I already have downloaded and I have “Prefer Downloaded Media” set to “Always”.
Sounds like possibly a bug? If you notice it again, open a new thread (to avoid cluttering this feature request), and include Plexamp logs. The logs will tell the tale.
As our mobile devices contain more and more storage, people download many albums to their devices to take on the road. When you travel, either on the airplane or maybe remote roads, cellular signal availability is diminished or none. One BIG missing feature is the ability to instruct the application to play only downloaded music - call it local mode. Or even better solution would be that the app should be smart enough to detect this condition. At this point app functions like Albums, Artists etc. should be working with downloaded/local content only and Stations functions should too.
Today, if you disable WiFi and put your phone into airplane mode all above functionality is disabled. I’d like to propose that we think about implementing this smart logic into the mobile application.
You can. Just go to the download section and play from there.
It is and will tell you if there is no connection to the server. It is intentional not to switch automatically so user know where the music is playing from.
