Hi
I love plexamp and use it very often. One thing that I miss and cannot understand why it is not there is the possibility to browse my music library by album when using Carplay. Currently, there is only an option to scroll through artists. Please add the different ways how music apps normally allow to browse the library (artists, albums, styles, etc…). Thanks!
Cheers, Chris
CarPlay doesn’t allow for long lists of things, so it didn’t seem to make sense to add that category 
Thanks for the quick response. How comes that for example Apple can have long album lists in their music app?
I’m not sure they do? Unless we mean different things by “long” or Apple is cheating with that letter-jumper thing we don’t have access to.
For example Spotify also has an option to show albums in a a list. You can see that for example here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHT3fQa0VbM
This post at github mentions lazy loading for lists. Maybe this helps? swift - Lazy Loading Data in iOS Carplay - Stack Overflow
Since not all users think the same way when using the app, it would certainly be a big win, if not only artists would be shown in carplay for Plexamp.
Read the last reply on that post:
If possible, a better solution is simply to load a long list of items initially. Note that CarPlay will enforce a limit of
enforcedContentItemsCountwhen MPPlayableContentManager.contentLimitsEnforced is true, for example, when a vehicle is in motion
I see. Tricky 
.
From this Spotify comment I assume that the current max item count should be in the hundreds (200?) CarPlay limiting lists to 200 items - The Spotify Community
This could be combined with the idea here by allowing to load more content into the list how to show all contents in CPList… | Apple Developer Forums
Like that it would be possible to load all the albums. This might also be combined with a first level of Letters and then ending up in the album list:
Albums → [A-Z] → Albums of current letter
What do you think about these ideas?
Sorry, I don’t think they solve the issue. 200 albums won’t cover it for most people, and that hacky idea to lazy load is pretty problematic as it causes a re-render and likely performance issues in larger lists.
The 2-level will allow more to be shown, but problematic for other reasons (people complain about the extra level, still limited to 200).
Sad to hear that you don’t see a way forward for this. I don’t know how much effort it would be to try the lazy load option, but it sounds to me that it is not quite clear how big the performance issues would really be.
Since the restriction of 200 items could also quite well apply to the artists section for some people, I as a product owner (thats actually my job in a software company :-)) would opt to investigate some options since having a list of playable content in various forms is a very basic feature a music app should offer.
Maybe there would also be a better UI options to directly jump to certain letters in a list view than having a selection level before the albums (e.g. when fast scrolling, showing a popup with the letters of the alphabet)
Hi
I have the same request as spacegoose, without the technical backup as it’s the same with me, I recently discovered PlexAmp and mainly use it in the car and I love it! I have, at last, found a way to exercise my B&O car HiFi with 24-bit FLAC recordings, they work a treat, and it is as though my car has said “Oh thank heavens something with some range”. So far, I have only converted 96 of 400+ albums from vinyl as I am rediscovering some original 80s & 90s bangers!
To sort of get around the lack of Album support I have created 2 Source folders, in the first is a normal one with every album identified properly and in the second I have changed the tag info to group them using the “Album Artist” tag.
So all my SoundTracks have the Album Artist set to “SoundTracks”, you see where I am going, and that way I can select the relevant “artist” and then it will show me all the album covers.
It’s a bit clunky and sort of works but given what “elan” is saying about long album lists we shall see going forward, but for my 2 pence (England) it would be a useful feature to have the same sort options as you have on the phone app (IPhone) in CarPlay, even if it has to load Albums 200 at a time.
I appreciate that for users with slow connections, that might be slow, but you work with what you have.
Just some thoughts.
Thanks
Adam
it’s not “at a time”. it’s total.
in which case Apple is cheating as I have 895 Albums in my Apple Music Albums list and can view them all in car-play, however, on reflection perhaps 895 Albums is excessive!
I see your dilemma and I suspect that you may well get this question asked a lot.
Thank you for PlexAMP btw I love it!
I think that’s not correct. The post I shared above (Apple Developer Forums) suggests fetching 200 next items (and replacing the previous 200 items) when reaching the end of the 200 item list.
As Bacon1967 mentions, it would be useful although one would have to load chunks of 200 items at a time. It’s miles better than not having the possibility at all for the ones working with albums and not artists.
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