I like that the plexamp app is an ‘as is’ bit of software, however if and when some of the features find their way into official apps it would be nice to see the new radios feature being merged in some way with a mixtrax type of system which creates a non-stop stream of music from a station / artist / album / playlist.
With the current setup on both plexamp and the official apps it waits for the current track to end before progressing on to the next, with mixtrax (http://www.mixtrax-global.com/en/) it uses an algorithm to find the best order the tracks should be played and where in each of the tracks it should start the song and end it to make the merger of the songs match in BPM and volume and many other pieces of information so it seems like the tracks haven’t switch.
It also uses fade effects to help the transition between the tracks sound nicer, mixtrax is not amazing at this but is one of the best I have found however I believe if Plex devs work on something like this when the official apps get updated to include some if not all of plexamp features it will be much better than mixtrax by the looks of how they developed plexamp.
Just a little thought I had while using the app, I do love a nice looking dedicated app for music, I hope it can be ported nicely to linux seeing as it is built using electron I would love to use this to setup an in car system just for music from my plex with my omega2.
@DJCMBear said:
With the current setup on both plexamp and the official apps it waits for the current track to end before progressing on to the next
That is not the case; you do need to be running the latest Plex Media Server and have your music analyzed (this can take a while). After that, it uses “smart overlapping” to make the transitions seamless.
To see if your tracks have been analyzed, you can get media info for a track:
That is not the case; you do need to be running the latest Plex Media Server and have your music analyzed (this can take a while). After that, it uses “smart overlapping” to make the transitions seamless.
To see if your tracks have been analyzed, you can get media info for a track:
So it does, I do take back the part about waiting for a track to finish before going on to the next.
However that is only a smart overlapping feature and not fully what mixtrax does plex does need to play the track to the end or at least near the end of a track to reach the ability to carry out the smart overlap to the next track.
With mixtrax it analyzes the tracks in realtime, shuffles them and finds the best start and finish positions of each and sometimes this could mean only the middle 30 seconds of a track gets played before progressing onto the next track but this will result into a unique listening experience every time you start a mix, and with shuffle also enabled plex could make this whole unique way of mixing songs into an endless stream of music.
Got it; I’ve never played with MixTrax myself, so I’ve never experienced it, but cutting out huge portions of tracks sounds a bit anathema to the way I usually want to listen to music :lol: Definitely an interesting suggestion though!
@elan said:
Got it; I’ve never played with MixTrax myself, so I’ve never experienced it, but cutting out huge portions of tracks sounds a bit anathema to the way I usually want to listen to music :lol: Definitely an interesting suggestion though!
You get use to it after listening for a bit, however having this as a feature like shuffle where you have to turn it on would allow the best of both worlds, it would need to be put to a community vote or something first because if it is just me who would like this feature I don’t think it would be worth the devs time to look into it, just an idea to think about for a future project or even better a feature in an official release, you never know while looking into this type of feature it could turn into something better or the team could learn something new resulting in other areas of plex improving, thats the up side of R&D.
