I discovered today that Plexamp now supports bit perfect playback but needs to be under a plex pass subscription to enable the feature.
Well, I just signed up for a Plex Pass subscription and it appears it doesn’t work, at least not with my phone and DAC.
Does anyone know on what phones this will work?
I have a Moto Edge 50 Neo with Android 15 and a FiiO KA1 DAC.
You can set audio output → sample rate matching to Smart or Strict to match it with the DAC, but without an exclusive mode you will never reach bit-perfect as the sound will go through the OS’ audio mixer. Currently Plexamp is not supporting Direct / exclusive output / Kernel Streaming / WASAPI, which I also hope they will change given the “audiophile focus” of this project. It is a bummer, the exact same song sounds much better currently on other players that are nowhere near this great looking as plexamp, but they have a much better audio engine to deliver the sound on a bit perfect way. (I currently use Neutron player on iOS and Audirvana/Pine Player Pro on my Mac which all have bit-perfect/exclusive mode delivery, but they are far inferior in everything else how they manage local libraries where Plex excels at.)
There is no such thing. It’s for music lovers, not audiophiles.
apologies, I thought https://www.plex.tv/plexamp/ is your website 
maybe you could reconsider your tenets internally? 
This guy brings receipts 
It works on my OnePlus 12 I believe.
Annoyingly on windows, playback is not bit perfect, yet when you play hires audio plexamp outputs the specs eg “192 khz” this people believe they are listening to the hires audio.
False advertising?
Have mainly moved to Linux where but perfect playback is available,n though when having to use windows, using the main Plex amp to play the audio and have plexamp open to find tracks. Really user-friendly this way 
Plexamp will display the bitrate of the file it is playing, but it has no control over what the Windows mixer does to it. That’s not “false advertising”. Blame Windows for having crappy audio processing.
Having said that, yeah I’d like to see bit perfect exclusive mode on Windows. But I’m much more interested in a replacement for Tidal’s streaming service integration. All my music in one app, available anywhere, that’s the holy grail for me.
Yes, windows has a crappy audio system, however if you can switch exclusive mode on the main Plex app in windows and playback hires audio, you’d think plexamp would have a higher priority to make this work, especially since many of us have quite a bit of hires audio and the equipment to appreciate it.
If plexamp is not in exclusive mode and outputting maximum 44.1 khz, then plexamp should be transparent and state this when playing audio instead of giving the original data rate. Many people don’t realize it can’t output hires audio and are fooled into thinking it can.
I doubt that Plexamp has any way of knowing what happens to the audio stream after it outputs it, Plexamp just knows what it is playing and outputting, so that’s what it shows. Like I said, I’m all for a bit perfect exclusive mode, but currently I would expect that if Plexamp is playing a 24/96 file, that’s what it’s going to show in the player, regardless of what Windows does to it after the fact.
On windows they know exactly what it outputs - a maximum of 16 bit/44.1
Not true.
I have set my DAC to 96 kHz. So that is what will come out of Plexamp.
Are you saying that on windows you are using plexamp and you are having output out of plexamp at 96 khz and your DAC is outputting 96 khz?
This would be quite strange as we have been told multiple times that plexamp on windows outputs at max 44.1/16 due to mixing in the windows audio system and as plexamp doesn’t have the ability to switch on exclusive audio as Plex and many other audio players for windows can.
But I presume you know that, so I’m confused by your statement.
By whom? It’s not true.
If I had to guess, I’d say you seem to conflate this with the old Android restriction, which maxed out audio at a sample rate of 48kHz. (It typically would even force playback of all sounds at 48kHz, so that pretty much all music would be forced through a problematic SR conversion from 44.1 to 48 kHz. Or maybe you are remembering the restriction of the ancient Windows sound system which was present until around Windows 95.)
The usage of higher sample rates and bit depths is not linked to the “exclusive mode”.
Windows allows you to set the default parameters of an audio output to e.g. 96kHz/24 bit, if its driver software is correctly reporting that capability to the Windows audio subsystem.
This is what I have done on my machine.
So when I play in plexamp without sample rate matching activated, everything is up sampled to 96kHz.
It’s not theoretically perfect, like strict sample rate matching would be, but damn good nonetheless, even with studio monitors connected. And sweet fades, plus loudness matching between tracks is more valuable in plexamp to me than a largely theoretical, very minute further improvement of fidelity.
Yes, you can set Windows to output at 96kHz - I know that. But that’s not the same as bit-perfect playback, which is what this thread is actually about.
Here’s the issue: Plexamp on Windows only uses WASAPI in shared mode, not exclusive mode. This has been discussed extensively on the forums (there’s a whole feature request thread called “Add Bit-Perfect Playback (WASAPI Exclusive Mode) on Windows” if you search for it). In shared mode, everything goes through the Windows audio mixer regardless of what sample rate you’ve set. So when you play a 44.1kHz file through your 96kHz output, Windows is upsampling it - that’s not bit-perfect, that’s resampling. And when you play a 96kHz file, it still passes through the mixer with its limiter at around -0.2 dBFS.
From the sample rate matching thread on these forums, someone pointed out:
“Non-exclusive mode means all audio is passed through the windows limiter. It only operates at about -0.2 dBFS but it’s a poor quality (low order filter) soft limiter.”
And from Roon’s community forums discussing Plex:
“PlexAmp is not bit perfect on most platforms especially Android it resamples like Roon. The windows app doesn’t have exclusive mode either and uses 44.1/16.”
The fact that your DAC displays 96kHz just means Windows is outputting at that rate - it doesn’t mean the audio is untouched. Every audio app worth its salt for hi-res (Tidal, Qobuz, Foobar2000, JRiver) supports WASAPI exclusive or ASIO. Plexamp doesn’t. Even the main Plex desktop app apparently handles this better.
My point isn’t that Plexamp can’t output above 44.1kHz (it can, if you configure Windows that way). My point is that without exclusive mode, you’re never getting bit-perfect audio to your DAC - Windows is always processing it. And Plexamp should probably be transparent about this rather than showing the source file’s native format as if that’s what’s actually reaching your hardware.
Of course it is. I myself said so above.
That for me is not really an issue, because
You are quoting a forum post as gospel?
It. is. not. true. Particularly the second sentence is utter nonsense.
Technically true.
But I stand by my point that it doesn’t matter in the real world.
The holy grail of “bit-perfect” playback was created back when mastering engineer Bob Katz gave a speech at AES about best practices in the studio during audio mastering for consumer formats.
It has been quite a few years since then. All what was available back then was either 44.1kHz or 48kHz, both with only 16 bit resolution. Given these restrictions, it is indeed problematic if a mastering engineer is monitoring their work with a SR conversion (from 44.1 to 48 or vice versa) in the signal flow.
The audiophile community jumped on it and appropriated that term for their own goals. And they still are praying that mantra over and over, without reflection. But by now it has lost a lot of its original urgency. We are now using much higher sample rates even on cheap-ish consumer equipment. Digital sound processing has been upgrading steadily from 16 bit integer accuracy back then, to nowadays widely 24 bit, often even reaching 32 bit and using floating point math, instead of integer.
With capabilties like that, the original “bit perfection” dogma to avoid resampling at all cost, and even to not allow a simple digital multiplication (which is all what a volume change involves) is simply misguided.
And so, since for some unknown reason Plexamp does not implement (at least) Wasapi, it is implied that playing a file at its original frequency is boomer stuff and that Windows mixer resampling is the new frontier. Throw away your drivers…
Is Plexamp still under active development? If yes, any hints what are the priorities/tenets for the team? Seems an exclusive audio mode would be very high on top many of our priority list over anything else, given the focus I copy-pasted from your website it would fit your vision too. Bit worrying the app (at least on ios) wasn’t even updated in the last 6 months, so not sure…
I’ve been getting correct incoming bitrates showing on my USB dac from plexamp headless on RPI
Yup, it works perfectly (bit-perfectly) under linux with the right settings (turn on strict sample rate matching; turn off everything that manipulates the bits like eq, sweet fades, limiter, etc.).
Best practice (in the widest sense imaginable): Don’t use windows.
You can search for the issue of exclusive audio on Windows — this problem has existed for many years, and there have been multiple promises that it would be fixed.
However, the reality is that it still hasn’t been resolved at all. The Windows version of the app was last updated back in May.
Given the company’s recent layoffs, I wouldn’t recommend having overly high expectations at this point.
