Plexamp horribly unintuitive. Now Playing Annoyances and general navigation. I hate it!

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Im trying to like PlexAmp but I find the GUI so annoying. And as someone who has been designing home automation GUI’s for a living for 20+ years for wealthy clients with no patience, Im qualified to state there are general good GUI design rules broken/ignored everywhere in the app. Certain things should stay put on every screen so the user has quick access to those things. The whole minimalist views thing is purely for aesthetics and not useful in any GUI.

Frustrations apply to both desktop and mobile versions.

My main annoyance is with the Now Playing Screen. I dont like that its split into BACK TO - UP NEXT - RELATED. And by nature each time you click on anything in these views the list changes which is horrible behaviour. I just want a view appropriate to where playback was started from. If I started playback from an Album View it should show the play queue as an album so I can navigate it as an album. If it was from a playlist I want to see the entire playlist. Please give us the option to have a sensible Play Queue view like this. Currently Ive got to click the tiny chevron to get back to the album view which is unnecessary and the entire view changes. Horrible.

Another annoyance is any view with the Now Playing bar at the bottom. You cant seek the track, yet there is the progress bar right there. I also dont like that theres only Pause and Next button. Yes yes I know you can swipe, but thats not great on a desktop PC with mouse. Again options to have full set of controls available and functional seek/progress bar on the Now Palying bar.

The top Library Bar and bottom navigation bar should stay put. This is so annoying to have them disappear for aesthetic reasons. Can you imagine if you car while driving made the steering wheel disappear to make the dashboard look nicer and you had to press a button to get it back?

Yet another annoyance while navigating the library is the lack of bread crumbs to show you where you are in the library tree. Breadcrumbs or a sidebar tree please.

From and audio point of view I do like the quality of playback and gapless features etc - so there’s that.

3 Likes
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Well, they added the missing window controls eventually so there’s hope for change.

For me, the way the bottom nav bar disappears is the worst part.

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Perhaps who knows. The Inability to quickly close the app on windows is yet another annoyance.

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Try Alt+F4
Doesn’t get quicker than that.

And you can enable the ugly Windows top bar in the settings.

3 Likes
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Or just hit the ESC key. So easy.

1 Like
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Yes but generally people drive Windows with a mouse. There are good reasons why windows has a title bar with a close button.

Usability should be the first consideration not aesthetics.

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This doesn’t address the issues I raised.

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