I would like to make an observation and see if others have similar ‘problems’ or found the issue…
Plexamp 3.1.1: No chromecast, Sweet Fades working.
Plexamp 3.2.0: Chromecast working, Sweet Fades not working at all.
Plexamp 3.2.1: Sweet Fades working, BUT not over chromecast.
Is this normal behaviour? I would expect Sweet Fades to work over chromecast as well.
Your insights (or even solutions) are more than welcome.
PS: yes, I’m one of those guys who love to skip to the end of the track, just to hear how sweet Sweet Fades are
The way I understand it, Plex casting is working differently than what you are used to with regular Chromecasting.
Regular Chromecasting takes the audio signal from an app and routes this to the CC receiver. The actual playback is still done by the casting app. Playback will stop as soon as you end the casting app, switch off the casting device, or go take away this device from the current local network.
Plex casting on the other hand is telling the Plex server to create a play queue and is telling the CC receiver to play this queue.
Once playback is commencing, you can close, remove, or switch off the controller app/device and playback on the CC device will still continue.
On the one hand this is obviously a major advantage.
On the other hand, it makes it impossible to do sweet fades. Because the actual playback is done by the Chromecast device.
And CC hasn’t learned how to do Sweet Fades.
AFAIK, implementing that would require a different Chromecast firmware.
But I doubt Google will implement such a thing upon Plex’s request.
If I understand you correctly, developers should move the Sweet Fades function from the Plexamp player to the Plex server. That way, the server would be able to feed the Sweet Fades to Chromecast… and not only for Plexamp, but for all plex players.
I would be very happy to get it on the roadmap. Even long-term, that’s ok with me.
Until then, I’ll continue streaming over radio to get my Sweet Fades on my big stereo.
From my understanding (please jump in @elan if I’m wrong…) Google Chromecast directs the RTP stream directly from the network source to the Chromecast endpoint and the controlling device merely acts as a controller of sorts. Therefore, the casting device is never actually inserted into the audio stream.
This has some benefits, as the controlling device is not a potential quality problem (additional transcoding, more network hopes, etc.) BUT, it also means that Plexamp never gets it’s paws on the audio to perform all it’s tricks. So, no audio level matching, sweet fades, etc.
AirPlay, on the other hand, takes the opposite approach by having the Apple control device in question handle all the audio processing directly and then stream the audio output over Wi-Fi to the AirPlay endpoint. This enables all the Plexamp goodies, but creates a new set of problems; especially if you AirPlay from your phone and, you know, use it like a phone. The audio stream is totally reliant on a solid, unwavering W-Fi connection to work well. Apple has buffering technology of course, but still - it’s hit and miss in the real world if you are running around the house with your phone in your pocket. And then if you take calls or start doing other things on your phone you’ll have to juggle all that as well.
As far as costing to Sonos (NOT via AirPlay), I think the situation is operationally similar to Chromecasting, but over DLNA or something like that. In this case, while you miss the awesome Plexamp audio enhancements, you DO get the absolute highest quality playback available from the audio file that Sonos happens to support.
