I’m trying to understand how Offline downloads works and some numbers let me a bit perplex. I probably missed something.
Example:
I have one complete album of David Bowie in my Library, a best of, made of 37 titles (2 discs)
I also have one other song of David Bowie from a compilation
Nothing more from this artist (it’s an example).
If I select the Best of album to download then choose to also “Download Artist Shuffle…” for the same Artist It should ends-up with: one download of the “best of” album (37 titles) + 1 song (the one that is part of a compilation).
But looking in the download section I found:
In Album section David Bowie best of Album uses 191Mb of space
In Artist section the same Artist for the same Album + 1 song uses another 196Mb of space.
So, the total amount of space occupied by music is 594Mb (instead of 403Mb). I do not understand why the very same album/songs/artist seems to be downloaded multiple times and consume a lot of space in smartphone. Are they really duplicated ?
Another consideration: Stating that there is 7 hours of music synced is a bit strange. From listener point of view there is only 4 hours of unique title to be played (the fact that titles/albums/artists are spread over multiple categories should probably not increase the total duration play.)
Working as designed It’s definitely possible to create scenarios like this which are wasteful to disk space, but it’s just not something we designed for.
This does seem like a very odd approach. Each time a track appears in a playlist it is duplicated?
I, and I’m sure most people, would usually create a ‘master download’ list, from which all offline play can feed. Plexamp limits a single playlist to 24hrs, which in itself stops this method from being effective and encourages the opposite approach: to download smaller lists and/or albums, which is harder to manage.
Here’s the problem: once I go offline (Android device) I can only play each track in the way it was downloaded. I can’t access a track in a playlist via an artist or album. I have 14.4GB downloaded. 778 tracks. My Artist, Album & Track libraries are all empty! Even if I download an album, nothing appears in my library at all - no Artists, no Album, no Tracks. It’s all muddled up on the Downloads tab. Essentially this is useless unless you only listen to whole albums or dumb playlists. It makes the offline experience completely disconnected from the rest off the app.
I’m going to hope that this is not by design, but is just a stepping stone. The improvements I’ve seen since V3 keep me believing It’s great that we now have a browsable library, and that Downloads can be saved to external media. Now we just need to be able to browse those downloads via that library and hopefully only have one copy of each track!
@elan said it was subject to improvement. So, I keep believing like you ! I’m pretty sure that offline mode will evolve and will even surpass plex player and make plexamp the best player for music both on streaming and offline usage. #believer
Well that’s certainly better news than the reply above Hopefully I am correct in thinking these two issues are linked - once the app can recognise tracks as browsable media it shouldn’t have any need to duplicate them. My hunch is that the developers are trying to keep the downloaded files inaccessible from outside of the app, unlike those downloaded by the Plex app. Fingers crossed this might eventuate into downloadable Tidal tracks - which would make a lot of people very happy indeed.
100% agree the download/offline support needs drastic improvement to be useful. I (used to) travel a lot, so I need 1) Pure offline mode that functions with no internet at all and 2) Non-streaming “online” mode that allows connectivity to the plex server (to, for example get updated playlists) but prohibits streaming over wifi and/or cell.
It’s definitely possible to create scenarios like this which are wasteful to disk space, but it’s just not something we designed for.
It’s great that we now have a browsable library, and that Downloads can be saved to external media. Now we just need to be able to browse those downloads via that library and hopefully only have one copy of each track!
