Plex mobile should offer a special music player mode, for instance to facilitate music selection while driving. The current UX is just plain dangerous because it is way too involved. The typical flow is to open the app, select local synced content, then choose a library, then find an artist, scroll to choose the album, and press the play button… Chances are you already bumped the car in front at this point
How about a special “driving mode” flow for music with oversimplified sequences?
First, I should be able to define local content and a specific collection as the default so that I never have to select it when the app starts.
Then, it should present me with nice, huge tiles of albums. Touching an album starts playing it immediately. Holding the album for 1.5 seconds opens a (big!) modal window where I can select the typical play options (add to queue and play next).
I’d prefer a separate music app altogether, Plex music has come a long way but I still refuse to use it due to the bulk and stick with Subsonic. I have about 30k tracks so having a separate music app that streams and caches would be amazing, can dump paying iCloud library and Subsonic.
I think a “driving mode” would be great. I’d also like to see more options for streaming so that I can set a lower quality if I need to preserve bandwidth.
The main frustration I have with the mobile player on my android is the lack of a default server option. I locally sync the music I want to hear on the go because I fly a lot for work, often drive through data dead zones. I browse my server via mobile app is less than 5% of the time. I use this a lot when riding my motorcycle or driving my car, and not being able to set my local phone as the default server requires the following sequence to get to my local phone synced music:
Tap Locations drop down menu /
tap [local phone] selection /
wait for page change which shows empty screen “Open the Navigation Menu and select…” /
tap Navigation Menu /
Tap Music, then I can finally pick an artist/song/etc
That is 5 steps that could completely be skipped if a feature were added to “Set Default Server.” 5 Steps that I have done while going 70 down the freeway on my motorcycle (i have a solid Ram phone mount so it’s heads up on handlebars behind fairing). Add the problematic touch screen functionality when wearing motorcycle gloves and you can more than double or triple the number of steps due to inaccurate glove taps. I know I should never do that, but it happens.
There have been enhancements to the player queue options and play artist, but the play artist (which should queue up all music by that artist) only queues up the first 2 albums or the first 20 tracks by that artist or something similar. I would rather see all songs load by that artist. Maybe a default behavior option setting would be best for handling that.
Thanks Plex team, all the above being said, i like having my own system and music. Keep up the good work.
