I’m beginning to like Plexamp, at least the DJ-ish features, but want to use it in my living room sort of like having my own personal Pandora.
I have an Android phone & very old tablet, a Roku, a WebOS TV, and a pretty decent hi-fi (yes, I’m old and still use that term), and a Plex Music Library almost 100% FLAC. There’s nothing to run Plexamp on directly, and the only reasonable alternative I have found is “casting”.
How does “casting” from Android to either the Roku or the TV work? Not the mechanics – I’ll figure that out. But rather, what DAC am I going to get? Will the Android device sort of “forward” the FLAC stream over to the Roku or TV which will in turn send the PCM bitstream to the Denon AVR, or what?
The best way to cast is to a Plexamp “headless” which is our term for the version which runs on a raspberry Pi or similar. Tiny little device, capable of high resolution bit-perfect playback, plugged into your receiver.
There are a number of advantages to doing it this way, including the fact that you don’t need the casting device to be active/around, as the headless version is a full Plexamp under the hood. You’ll get instant connectivity/reactivity, great audio, and flexibility connections, what’s not to like?
I don’t know what’s not to like. Technical complexity, maybe.
While looking into this a bit, I see that Plexamp can “fling” to another player. Plexamp on my phone sees Plex on my Roku Ultra, but I can’t seem to connect to it. Is this supposed to work? What do I look for?
I guess the Plexamp on Raspberry Pi solution isn’t a mere player being “flung” to but rather generates the server play queue on its own. If the “fling thing” works the way I guess it does, sending the PCM stream to the Roku, I think that’s satisfactory for now.
Hey Elan. What about the seldom mentioned “mesh” feature? Is it still in the works?
I would love to see this on hardwired headless players to do multi-room music.
That’s interesting, especially in light of the recent announcement about splitting the Plex client into multiple apps. I s’pose I’ll have a go with a Pi and see where that takes us.
It seems the best bet for actual Raspberry Pi hardware would be this Cana Kit as it has entirely passive cooling, power supply and cables.
But $170
It is possible apparently to have Plexamp Headless on a 1LPC running Ubuntu 22. I found this Docker installer on github (well, he says Docker but the example is Podman, which I know even less about than I do Docker). I already have an HP ProDesk 400 (i5-6500T/8 GB) lying about.
What’s not to like about this, at least until I decide whether I want something smaller/quieter/less power consumption?
@trleith, It’ll run on that HP. Anything linux that runs nodejs. I’ve run it on 10 year x86 thinkpads and imacs. You don’t need to dedicate a raspberry pi just to try it out.
This article lays out how to set up nodejs version. You can have a single node version per machine or per user environment with nvm. If you already have ubuntu 22 installed this takes a couple of minutes and plexamp is up on that HP.
I’d be running it myself everywhere in the house but alas no multi room.
agree with above post, you might already have what you need to try it out … some additional notes below on going the pi route, since i already had it typed out
a pi5 with at least 2GB of memory is a good option … and i recommend a pi fan or active cooler and the 27W usb-c power supply to go with that … plus an sd card to install the OS
audio out from the pi depends on what your hifi needs as an input … if you need analog, get a dac hat … or a digi hat with spdif coax or optical for digital output … or often the easiest is to use usb out to a compatible dac
for OS, you can start with raspberry pi OS 64 bit lite and then one of the many available installer scripts for headless Plexamp … link to my installer + documentation is here
also mentioned in the gist link above, RoPieee is another great OS option for a dedicated pi-based audio streamer
@tgp-2 What I’m hoping to get with hardware having HDMI is the bitstream over HDMI to the DAC in my Denon AVR. That I think requires something in the chain to take whatever it is I get from the Plex Media Server and wrap it up in Dolby Digital for the AVR as the least common denominator PCM stereo bitstream. I have zero idea what I’m talking about here though – it’s just the model in my head.
I just tried using Bliss OS on the HP machine as a “live” uninstalled OS, and installing Plexamp from the Play Store, so Plexamp for Android, not the headless version. It apparently works; I have gotten it to let me browse my library and play some music. It didn’t send the audio out over the HDMI by default – it was using the machine’s internal speaker.
But Plexamp crashes randomly, by which I mean it just vanishes, whilst Bliss/Android is apparently fine. I expect it’s a problem with Bliss. I haven’t gone looking for a log file. I don’t think I want to fool with it any longer unless someone here wants me to try and report back. But I’m going to need some hand-holding.
I am pleased to report plexamp-headless is running on my old HP ProDesk 400 (i5-6500T/8 GB), logged into my Plex account, it found my Plex Media Server, I can control it at IP Address:32500, and from Plexamp on my phone.
What I have to do now is understand how to configure ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) which is what came native in Ubuntu Server. I want to avoid installing anything else because it’ll only confuse the issue.
That will be the next bit of this adventure. I wonder how the pre-built Raspberry Pi Plexamp image @elan spoke of could be pre-configured to take advantage of the HDMI output on the board versions that have `em. I already have a perfectly adequate DAC but it needs HDMI (or optical).
