Awesome, thanks!
Curious, what’s the release schedule for PlexAmp like? Is there a regular release cycle?
Given that it’s a Labs project, it doesn’t have a fixed release cadence like many of the other official apps. Given that it has autoupdate built in, and we have a CI up and running for it, I would expect that generally we’d see a release between every 1-3 weeks 
That’s cool. Thanks for the response!
It’s quite a hog when visuals are enabled. Also after it starts to use the high performance GPU it won’t stop even after you turn off VIZ, not sure if this can be fixed on the developer side. Another neat thing would be to stop the visualizers when the app is not visible or make it so the basic 2D visualizers don’t require the high perf GPU - seems a bit overkill.
I’m perfectly happy with the visualizer disabled for now, but it would be nice if you would not have to stop the music and restart the app when the party is over.
Some of the visualizers are quite expensive, e.g. Tahitian Pearls. We’ll try to do a better job in the future of ensuring they’re cleaned up better when the music stops 
(We’re not doing anything explicit to ask for the higher performance GPU, to be clear; might be some Electron default behavior, not sure)
I thought I’d give a quick update on my PlexAmp usage. I’ve now switched completely from iTunes to Plex, and for the past couple of weeks used PlexAmp exclusively for all daily music needs at my computer. All in all it’s been a great experience.
A few follow-up thoughts:
- When searching would it be possible to customize the order of search result categories? So individual track search results always display last? I rarely want to find a specific track, but rather an album.
- Jumping to a different position – even just 2 seconds ahead – in the same track requires a (long) pause before resuming play. Shouldn’t the track be cached already?
- If I click the focus key-combo once, I lose focus (obviously) from the app where my attention was previously. I can’t easily refocus on my “work” app again. CMD + TAB brings another app to the foreground, and I have to CMD + TAB from that to return to the “work” app. Is it possible to come up with a usable workflow for easily bringing PlexAmp to the foreground, and then returning to my “work” app using a purely keyboard-based approach?
- Following on from the keyboard-based approaching, it’d be great to search for an album, and then navigate through the list of search results with my arrow keys, and start my selection by clicking ENTER.
- There was an outage of the plex.tv system last week(?), during which I couldn’t get PlexAmp or the iOS Plex client to work. That sucked. I read that there’s some sort of credential caching, and I don’t remember having been affected during previous outages, but that provoked a bit of cold feet concerning the viability of removing my local music library.
A more general “Plex for music”-comment that’s not really related to PlexAmp: It’s an unfair comparison, but the iOS Plex music experience feels less polished than using the Apple Music app. I miss the Siri integration, and easily starting music on the go. It’s cumbersome having to switch back and forth in the app between local playback on the iPhone and controlling other Plex devices at home. The actual switching-workflow is probably as streamlined as it can be, but switching back and forth multiple times every day when I leave the house, come back, go grocery-shopping etc. is tedious. So for now – for me – “music on the go” still means transcoding my flac source files to an Apple-compatible format, adding that to iTunes, and syncing it to the iPhone. I’d love to see Plex come up with a more frictionless workflow here.
So… For daily computer-usage PlexAmp is still great, and good enough for me to ditch iTunes. But that just makes me want more from the mobile client
When searching would it be possible to customize the order of search result categories?
It’s supposed to sort based on quality of result. For example, if I search for “bitter:swe” I get the artist first, then album, then tracks. But it’s definitely not perfect.
Shouldn’t the track be cached already?
Totally agreed, we have in the plans to greatly improve caching.
Is it possible to come up with a usable workflow for easily bringing PlexAmp to the foreground, and then returning to my “work” app using a purely keyboard-based approach?
That is a great question. Open to suggestions. It’s possible that bringing back the dock icon would make things work better?
it’d be great to search for an album, and then navigate through the list of search results with my arrow keys
100% agreed.
during which I couldn’t get PlexAmp or the iOS Plex client to work
Nooooooo! Plexamp caches all sorts of stuff and should work fine across outages (I’ve even used it before during outages to test). Are you positive this wasn’t working? If so, we’ll put it through a full test with faked outage.
Thanks for the great feedback and kind words!
@elan said:
Is it possible to come up with a usable workflow for easily bringing PlexAmp to the foreground, and then returning to my “work” app using a purely keyboard-based approach?
That is a great question. Open to suggestions. It’s possible that bringing back the dock icon would make things work better?
I’m not sure it’s the same, but I’ve actually dragged the PlexAmp icon down into my dock so I could more easily make the window reappear. I think in the initial version, typing the focus keyboard combo, didn’t make the window appear if I had “CMD + H”-hidden the PlexAmp window. But I can see that there’s no dot underneath the app icon, so it’s not “open/running” in the sense that my other apps are. Without being an expert on how the OS handles this, then yeah, having PlexAmp available as an alt+tab item/target would probably make it easier to jump back and forth?
during which I couldn’t get PlexAmp or the iOS Plex client to work
Nooooooo! Plexamp caches all sorts of stuff and should work fine across outages (I’ve even used it before during outages to test). Are you positive this wasn’t working? If so, we’ll put it through a full test with faked outage.
I always worry when Plex isn’t available 
! The PlexAmp was running from the night before, and wouldn’t perform any actions. The iOS app just kept spinning trying to connect. My own server was reachable over ssh. My only caveat is that I’m currently enjoying an extended stay in Canada, while the server is in Denmark, and the latency waiting for navigation actions to complete as well as random errors/timeouts is 
But that’s probably more of a general the-other-side-of-the-planet-is-far-away-even-on-the-internet thing, and not an issue with Plex. But the total “I can’t use Plex on my regular devices” was a first.
But the total “I can’t use Plex on my regular devices” was a first
Yeah, that’s totally unacceptable to us and we’ve prioritized identifying the misbehaving apps and crushing the bugs.
@elan said:
But the total “I can’t use Plex on my regular devices” was a first
Yeah, that’s totally unacceptable to us and we’ve prioritized identifying the misbehaving apps and crushing the bugs.
Any chance you might give the PlayStations users 2 mins to answer us in between your little side projects?
Pinged you many times, including 4 days ago.
http://forums.plex.tv/discussion/219461/platform-update-for-ps4#latest
Haven’t seen an update in ages, app is brutal… but hey, Plexamp. It’s just disrespectful at this point.
Thanks
@KarlDag ~ I’ve requested some attention on that thread from the team in change. Please don’t assume I have visibility into every project.
