Is there any hope of getting a more robust android app or an android app dedicated to music?

General Discussions
1

To be honest - this is the main reason I have a plex pass - to be able to play my music anywhere. I’d like to see a more stable android app (or perhaps one dedicated to just music.)

The problems with the current app on Android.

  1. Playlists sometimes stop showing what is playing - this happens mostly when casting to a chromecast but can also happen randomly.
  2. The audio caching level is often too small. Playback is sometimes stop and start even when cell service is full.
  3. Sometimes the app just refuses to connect unless you restart the device. I notice this is a problem on my phone which is running the latest version of Android and not on my tablet which has stopped receiving Android updates a while back.
  4. Managed users cannot see ALBUM GENRE in the app - only ARTIST GENRE. This makes it annoying when you’re looking for Holiday Music. :neutral:

I love the new Plexamp app. I would love to see gapless playback introduced in to the android plex app as well as the plex webapp. My library is large and hard to manage in the Plexamp app. I’d love to see the amp made a little more robust but more importantly, I’d love to see the normalize and gapless playback in the main plex apps.

This product is pretty good . . . it’s just a few tweaks and a hair shy of being great. I’d love to see it become great.

2

I agree that there are many small niggling issues preventing Plex from working well with music (much less audio books, but that’s another story).

I suspect your issue with the “audio caching level” is due to a lack of transcoding. I use FLAC for all my music which means that when I’m on a less-than-perfect network I get terrible dropouts. I’d love to be able to force all remote streaming to transcode to something like 192kbps MP3 on the fly.

3

I agree with you on all counts. The Android app is solid for video, but is so-so with audio. The new PlexAmp is shaping up to be a top-notch desktop music app. Seeing a port of that to Android (and FireTV) would be a big step in the right direction.

4

yes, I would like this as well! Gapless audio on android would be perfect

5

Right now Plex on Android is straight up unusable remotely on lte. There are 10 second buffet times between every file and seek attempt.

6

I certainly agree with you about the music playlists, I’ve always found it to be unreliable on android especially when casting the music to a google cast speaker. Recently I’ve noticed similar issues with video playlists as well (not updating to the currently playing video and sometimes disconnecting from the casting device so you lose control) so the Android app seems to be getting more buggy over time.