Hey guys, just thought you’d like some feedback about my experience with this app. Can’t find too many references to these issues, and they’ve persisted for a few versions, so I thought it was a good idea to mention them.
I’d like to start by saying that this is an excellent listening experience and the feedback in no way detracts from the job you guys have done.
For the record, I use this in a BMW using the “Bluetooth Audio” option - not the proprietary BMW API interface, but just over Bluetooth audio directly from my iphone.
Listed from least to most “troubling”:
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doesn’t always send Album art to the car screen. Seems rather random when it does and doesn’t. Sometimes art is blank and sometimes art is stuck on the first album it plays, and when the song changes, the album art does not. note: this does not happen with other players so its unrelated to the car or the internet connection
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sometimes the song titles will just say “Plexamp” and there will be many of them to scroll and choose from using the car’s interface (when this happens, they all say “Plexamp”). usually the way it’s supposed to work is that it displays the song title and then there’s a “Next Track” and “Previous Track” option. Not sure what triggers this.
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doesn’t always pick up where it left off when I get out of the car, and then come back later. There seems to be no pattern to this happening or not. Sometimes I have to open Plexamp and press play and other times it just remembers. this may be a BMW thing so maybe not just a plexamp issue?
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Track caching over wifi - I’ve set it to the max of 40, but it /never/ caches 40. Or at least, the cache gets cleared prematurely and I can’t tell why, but I always wind up having to download while I’m on the road. My server is behind a VPN and I don’t share publicly over the internet, so my typical MO is to download overnight while the phone is at home, and then I’ll have music ready to go the next morning. I can access the VPN over wireless while I’m driving to download when I have to, but I’d rather just rely on the caching feature, which is something that sets plexamp apart!
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Skipping songs forwards and backwards - I think you guys have started to address this, but I still have instances where multiple songs are getting skipped, or a song will start playing from the very end rather than the beginning
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Sweet Fades - i LOVE LOVE
this feature. I just wish it worked reliably. It will do a sweet fade once or twice maybe per listening session. I define a “session” as “I got in the car, turned it on, pressed play, and started listening”. Usually, the fade works from the second song to to the third song in my playlist. It almost never works before that, or after that. My expectation was that it would sweet fade between almost every 2 tracks. I realize that some tracks make it impossible to do this, or make it hard to tell, but I am pretty sure this feature is not working reliably, at least not over bluetooth in my car. -
I always shuffle my playlists. Sometimes, shuffle mode gets cleared randomly, and repeat mode gets selected. This is really annoying, sorry to say, because the randomness of the playlist is lost, even if I reshuffle, and songs I’ve already played get reselected sooner than they should. It also purges any downloaded songs from the cache since the shuffle list is now new. If this happens while I’m on the road, I have to stream to get music. I cannot for the life of me tell what triggers this, but it happens about once a week.
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The shuffle algorithm is not truly random. This seems to be the case with ALL players I’ve ever used - there’s always an affinity for certain songs. I don’t know why this is, as it makes no sense, and I was hoping Plexamp would be different. I have over 12,000 songs, and the fact that certain songs come up time and time and time again seems baffling, and wrong.
Thank you for taking the time to read all of this, and for making this app. This app alone justifies the price of a Plex Pass, IMO, so I really want it to be the best it can be!
