Ideas to improve Plexamp

Plex Labs
1

I’ve been using streaming music services since they first became available. I’ve probably tried them all – Rdio, Pandora, Deezer, Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Roon…

… and for me, Plexamp is BY FAR the best. Combining my personal library of 80k songs with Tidal to fill in the rest works amazingly well. Unlike other services, I find that Plexamp doesn’t serve me the same music over and over again – I’m constantly discovering new music and rediscovering old favorites, and it’s usually as easy as tapping .

As great as it is, I do think there’s room for improvement:

  1. We need a way to save custom mixes, such as the mixes created via the Artist Mix Builder and Album Mix Builder. It shows in Recent Plays, but eventually gets knocked off the list as I play other things. This should be easy.

  2. When creating Artist Mix Builder it needlessly restricts the search to add something to the mix. For instance, if I want to add an artist but I only remember the name of a song, I can’t search via the song name and then select the artist. I should be able to search artist, track, or album. The Album Mix builder allows input of song or artist to find the album, so it’s weird that Artist Mix is restricted to only searching by artist.

  3. Also in Artist and Album Mix builder, it seems to pull search results only from my personal collection but not Tidal. Why? This seems needlessly limiting. If the concern is that Tidal would slow down the display of results (or something), at least give us a toggle on the Search tab screen to select “Also show Tidal results”.

  4. In the Artist Mix builder, I can click the 3 dots and select Play Radio (my preferred option) but in Album Mix builder there’s no Play Radio. Why not?

  5. I still don’t understand how & when Plexamp uses Tidal. Is it only for a Discovery station? Otherwise it seems to use only tracks from my personal library. In my mind, Tidal should act like an extension of my library and it should be pulling in tracks all over the place (at least as an option that I can toggle on/off easily at will). While I do have ~80,000 tracks in my library, it seems artificially limiting to not include the millions of other tracks on Tidal in the majority of what Plexamp does.

  6. It would be great to be able to modify stations on the fly, with some “Fine Tune” settings like Slacker Radio has (or had the last time I used it years ago). You could adjust whether you wanted the radio to output more popular vs deep tracks, more discovery, more crowd favorites, more of your own favorites, or restrict it to music from a certain range of years. Also would be nice to be able to edit the “seed tracks” (or artist or albums) for a station after it’s already created – this would probably have to be done after adding the ability to save custom stations.

  7. Some explanation of what the star ratings do in the background would be nice. I thought that rating something 5 stars would be equivalent to telling the backend algo “I like songs like this” but instead it seems to result in “repeat this song as often as possible”. I think 1 star is “hardly ever play this song again” but no idea what 2, 3, 4 stars does. After rating something 5 stars resulted in it being played all the time, I’m kinda wary about using the ratings at all until I know exactly what’s going on.

  8. Playlists need a lot of work (though honestly not a high priority for me). There seems to be no way to easily add songs to a playlist? I have to search in the regular search, then select “Add to…” then select “Add to Playlist…” then select the playlist. Why not just have a “+” button in the playlist, where I can search and then tap in the results and add a song to the playlist in one step? And also there’s no way to batch edit a playlist?

  9. I’d like a preference to remove all the NFC options on the menus. This is a niche feature that I will never use. Low priority but had to ask :slight_smile:

Thanks!

3 Likes
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Can already be done, (while it is still playing). Long press on the song title, “Save as playlist”

The mix builder is for building mixes, not for starting radios. If you wanted to do that, you can easily seek out the artist on the library tab.

Try playing an Artist Radio for a longer while. Particulaly one, where you don’t have many “similar artists” in your personal library.

What does that mean?

3

While Apple is introducing “Apple Music Classical” for listeners of classical music, in Plex we still can’t even sort by composer. The long requested support for a composer tag ist a must, IMHO.

4

Unless I’m missing something, a playlist and a station are fundamentally different things. I want to restart the station later, not listen to a handful of songs in my queue again.

Batch editing a playlist means you can select to add or delete multiple songs at once, instead of only one song at a time.

1 Like
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If you restart the same radio later, you won’t get the same selection of songs in the same sequence as you did the first time.
I was assuming you wanted to preserve that.

Have you tried it? It won’t just save a handful of tracks.

6

That’s exactly what I want. I don’t want to save a static list, even if it’s 100 songs. I just want to be able to quickly restart the radio again. Usually my stations are what I built with Artist Mix Builder. It’s too tedious to have to manually rebuild these stations every time I want to go back to them. I’m really surprised that Plexamp can’t save these stations for replay later, because that seems like bare-minimum functionality for a music app these days.

1 Like
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I wonder if Plex developers have any comments about these suggestions?

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