The newest version of Plexamp will play higher sample rates and 5.1 – but only if you start the play queue with such a file.
I can only talk about Windows though.
The sound interface must be defined as a 5.1 speaker configuration in the Windows settings.
Then you select this particular sound interface in Plexamp, instead of leaving it on “auto”.
Plexamp will not change the sample rate of the interface according to each file. Instead, it will use whatever the first file in the playqueue is using and then keep it that way until the play queue is paused or stopped.
If you can use Plex for Windows/Mac or Plex Media Player as your client, surround music is no problem.
On Windows, I can even use the Plex Web app in Chrome to play 5.1 flac files.
I have my media server using Ubuntu on Linux. I don’t know what settings I need to get 5.1 and high sample rates out to my Av processor.
In Ubuntu audio settings, there are options of 2.0, 5.1 and 7.1. If I set to 2.0 or 5.1, everything comes out in 2.0. If I set to 7.1, everything comes out in MCH.
This thread is about Plexamp. Plexamp doesn’t run on ATV or Smart TVs.
To my knowlege you can only achieve surround sound on these “video players” if you treat those albums like a video. (Most of them come as such on DVD or Bluray.)
Which unfortunately means they must be added to a video library, not a music library.
I really have no idea why it takes years to “add” 5.1 support for playing music while it is working for movies. This cannot be a great thing. The “joke” is, that is works with the Plex addon in Kodi. This is just ridiculous. I can also cast 5.1 to Chromecast on NVidia shield with freeware software(!) - but native Plex app is downmixing to 2.0 PCM.
It has been broken on Apple TV for nearly 3 years now. There is no sign that it is anywhere near the top of the list of things for them to do. I wouldn’t hold my breath.
And that’s the problem for us multi channel fans. All of those updates are useless without a real working multi channel audio app; something you used to support. It would be so much easier on the rest of us if Plex would just say: We are not going to support multi channel audio only anymore. Then we could all move on. 3 years is a long time to wait.
@bruceagreenberg : Fully agree!
I’m angry on me for paying LifeTime Pass. All these minor “new features” are totally useless!
Being able to play movies with all formats of 5.1/7.1, atmos … whatever - but no multichannel music. It’s a shame! WHY? WHY? Please give a technical reason. WHY??
The simple answer, as I understand it, is that things broke with changes in the device OS’s, like Apple TV. Plex was originally using the devices’ audio engine to save development time. When that stopped working, their only choice was to build their own audio engine for all the devices Plex supports. That is a decent sized task and, most important, for them it is a low priority. So we pay for it (that is a pun, since we paid for the life time pass as well). They need to throw a couple of developers on it, and they would rather throw them on video based projects, which is where most of their users are. And so, as of right now, there is no software that runs on streaming devices that plays multi channel audio only and has a good interface, like Plex. VLC works, but its interface sucks. And that is the short answer. I run JRiver on a PC and have a cable that converts HDMI to ethernet and then back again for my long run to my home theater. They have an app on phones that will control what gets played. It is something my wife would never be able to handle, so it doesn’t get used much. But I have it for when my music friends come over. JRiver has one of the best audio engines out there. They’ve been around for a long time and what comes out of their software sounds great. It is just a pain to deal with when what I want is the ease of a streaming device. I hope that explains things a bit.
That explanation is not entirely correct. Our Apple TV app moved to using the audio engine developed independently for Plexamp, which didn’t originally support multi-channel output.
In the intervening time it has been enhanced to support multi-channel output as well as sample rate matching (which you can try today on Plexamp for iOS and macOS). As I understand it, the Apple TV team is working to incorporate the upgrades.
Wow! I’ve been trying to get an answer for almost 3 years. Thank you for that. So, I was sort of right. You were moving to your own engine is what I said. The reality was that you had already moved to your own engine and broke it when you did that. It is nice to finally know what is going on. Now… “when?” is the big question. Maybe as CTO you might have a bit of pull to get the ATV team to make this a higher priority, given that it went down in May of 2019. But… Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, for at least shedding some light on this subject. I will repost to the thread I’ve been keeping open.
OK - I give up!
I have no idea what Apple TV has to do with the subject of this thread: “Playing Music with 5.1 channels”. No explanations regarding missing 5.1 music playback. sigh…
