Plexamp Release Notes

[elan]

v1.0.1

We’re thrilled to announce a new release of Plexamp with a bunch of updates and fixes. The music-loving late-night crew has been hard at work. In case you’re wondering, the main priorities for us right now are:

• Fixing things which are totally broken.
• Giving configurability via config files to at least let people tweak settings (first make the impossible possible, then make the possible easy, right?)
• Having fun! (Hence all the new visualizers)

Autoupdate inside the app, or visit the Plexamp site for direct downloads.

Feast your eyes on some of the new visualizers available in this release!

NEW

• Linux support!
• Add settings to allow disabling volume normalization and crossfade.
• Global search key now displays the window, if hidden.
• Allow overriding all keybindings in the config file.
• Allow browsing into Recent Playlists as well.
• Allow disabling notifications via config file.
• Added new visualizers: Neutrona, Tahitian Pearls, Shuriken, Amoeba, Amnesiac, Spiderweb, Retrospect, Waffles.
• Spectrum visualizer now runs on the GPU.

FIXED

• Fixed an issue playing music which hadn’t been analyzed yet.
• (Windows) Fixed F11 full-sizing the app.
• Sped up the HTTP proxy, don’t read ahead so much, should improve bandwidth usage.
• Allow Plex Cloud servers from any region to work.
• (Windows) Hopefully fixed the issue where notification images wouldn’t change.
• (macOS) Audio works on older versions of macOS.
• Make the Lava Lamp visualizer more ghostly.
• Increased the height of the gradient behind the control overlay for better visibility.
• (Windows) Descenders on some letters appeared cut off in the player.
• Show track artist over album artist in the play queue.
• Remote servers running on port 443 could result in playback not displaying.
• Poster art with a non-square aspect ratio would get cropped unevenly.
• Lists of albums in a genre were missing header and back button.
• Sometimes when changing visualizer and size settings, one wasn’t properly saved.
• Fixed connecting to servers with self-signed certs and SAN certs (many thanks to @“kevin.burdett” and @stedaniels for the help!)
• (Windows) Reworked the system tray icon for better visibility.

[elan]

v1.0.2

NEW

• Added new Rothko, Bloodstream visualizers.
• Activation key combo just shows window; second press kicks off search.
• Added a new “Show on All Desktops” option on macOS.

FIXED

• Fixed pluralization of album counts in artist lists.
• Fixed some visualizers not working on some video cards.
• Fixed crashes with audio devices with more than 8 channels.
• Freaqy and Galaxy visualizers now run on GPU.
• Updated to Electron 1.7.11 for security fixes.
• Update visualizer better when switching between local and remote players.
• Restart MPD properly if it crashes.
• Fix streaming from Google Drive with Plex Cloud.
• Improve visibility of play buttons against brighter backgrounds.

[elan]

v1.0.3

We’re back with another update, with some really nice things under the hood. We’ve adjusted how crossfading tracks display, made audio follow the current selected output, fixed the evil “slow to resume playback” bug on Windows, added simple volume control, and more!

Bonus: if you use Slack, make sure to check our little Slack Music Status app (it works with music playback from any Plex app).

NEW

• Added new Scratch visualizer.
• Show new track when crossfading starts, not ends.
• Track current audio output device.
• (macOS) Touchbar support.
• Display codec/bitrate on hover.
• Soft volume control via keybinding (cmd/ctrl + alt + up/down, volumeup and volumedown actions).
• (Linux) Basic MPRIS support.

FIXED

• (Windows) Resuming from pause could take a very long time.
• Artist titles weren’t always clickable on album preplays.
• Update Electron for more security fixes.
• (Linux) Set window type to be “splash”.
• Improve genre browsing and shuffling.
• Genre icons in lists appeared cropped.
• Remote controlling Plex Media Player wasn’t working.
• Restore play queue if MPD process needs to be restarted.

[elan]

v1.0.4

FIXED

• Backed out a change on Linux which prevented moving the window.

[elan]

v1.0.5

Lots of fixes, some pretty new visualizer pixels!

NEW

• Upgraded to Electron 1.7.13.
• The Soundprint visualizer now runs on the GPU, has loudness tweening.
• Colors are now tweened across track changes in all GPU visualizers.
• Added the new Dot Matrix visualizer.
• Trails visualizer runs on GPU and has been visually upgraded.

FIXED

• An issue where player name could appear with e.g. %20 characters.
• When switching outputs, time offset is more carefully preserved.
• Fix an issue probing files, causing some MP3 files (at least) to not play.
• Visualizer motion was glitchy AF on Linux, now buttery smooth.
• Fixed Neutrona viz on certain video cards.
• Some right margins on text fixed.
• Switched player port from 20000 to 36000.
• Use a bit less CPU during visualizers (still work to be done).
• Buffer a bit more to improve performance over slower networks.
• Fixed browsing to artist from album page in some cases.

[elan]

v1.1

Support for TIDAL, podcasts (select them from source menu) and lots of fixes!

NEW

• Podcast support!
• TIDAL support!
• Support for view offset resuming (e.g. for audiobooks, podcasts).
• Much faster (up to 3x) startup for MP3 files.
• Make popular tracks hub clickable.
• Upgrade to Electron 1.7.15.

FIXED

• Remote controlling Plex Media Player wasn’t working.
• Allow connecting to remote player when stopped.
• Fix a few graphical glitches and minor bugs around remote control.
• When changing audio outputs, don’t resume playback if paused.
• Fix an issue where media sockets to server could leak.
• Missing album art with newer servers.
• (macOS) Smaller versions of the app icon were corrupted.
• (Windows) Notifications weren’t working on newer Windows 10.
• When paused for a long time, media could fail to resume.

[elan]

v3.0

My God, it’s full of stars.

[elan]

v3.0.1

(Releasing in Google Play and Apple stores, desktop released)

Added

• macOS: Preference around elastic scrolling.
• Add All Music on home screen.
• Add Visualizer selection item on the player popup menu.

Fixed

• Android: Fix battery drain issue while stopped.
• macOS: Add standard system menu items.
• User picker screen doesn’t scroll properly.
• Android: Spectrum viz didn’t work.
• Android: Reported crash during playback.
• Improve error message when no servers or music libraries found.
• Fix black screen when no usable server was found.
• In some case you couldn’t scroll to the bottom of a playlist.
• Send final stopped state so playback disappears from server.
• Browsing from Recent Play track to artist didn’t work.

[elan]

v3.0.2

(Google Play and Apple store and desktop released)

Added

• Add Playlist type to All Music.

Fixed

• Users in Plex Home weren’t able to sign in.
• File descriptor leak in player.
• Some podcasts wouldn’t play.
• Downloads didn’t work in some cases.
• Transcoded downloads didn’t always show bitrate.
• Transcoding from server could fail.
• Disallow download option in some cases.
• Disable flipped layout in RTL regions.
• Fix All Music sort when switching types.
• Crash on start with title-less Recent Play.
• Default ‘My Podcasts’ to shows.

[elan]

v3.0.3

Added

• Playback speed control (enabled by default only for Podcasts).
• Direct Play and download DSD.
• Direct Play and download PCM inside AIFF and WAV.
• Android: Allow downloading to external storage.
• Add ability for streaming playback to use downloaded media.

Fixed

• Plays from Aural Fixations contribute to Recent Plays.
• Track indices over 100 crop.
• Reorganize downloads settings into own screen.
• Improve codec display for albums (and show w/o studio).
• iOS: Scrollbar offset on episode screen.
• Focus text input after clearing.
• Scrub tokens from debug logs.
• Desktop: Cropped codec with smaller widths.
• Android: Don’t store offline files in cache.
• When playing episode, store Podcast in Recent Play.
• Some smart playlists wouldn’t download.
• When downloading transcodes, bitrate was sometimes too high.

[elan]

v3.1

Added

• iOS: CarPlay!
• New Related section in player.
• New Back To section in player.
• Android: Add audio API setting.
• Add 1 Mbps and 2 Mbps quality options.
• Optional album codec badges (disabled by default).
• Reorder play queue by long press and dragging.
• Try to use audio device’s preferred sample rate in more cases.
• Reordering and deleting tracks from non-smart playlists.
• Landscape mode shows Play Queue.

Fixed

• Desktop: Tweak draggable region to interfere less with top-right context menus.
• Clicking on a track in a playlist adds playlist to Recent Plays.
• Don’t offer context menu action to add a playlist track to itself.
• Speed up playlist page loading.
• Remove duplicate source titles from playlists.
• Improve visibility of hub underlines in dark mode.
• Fix alignment of menu item for adding to recent playlist.
• Don’t show “Add to library” for shared content.
• Albums show > 200 tracks.
• Artists show > 200 albums.
• Android: Reported crash.
• Desktop: Request compressed HTTP replies.
• A case where transcoded offline downloads could fail.
• iOS: With app in foreground, remote control wouldn’t resume.
• The app could use 100% CPU when pre-caching setting was high.
• A failed play queue item would prevent the rest from pre-caching.
• Changing the pre-caching value didn’t immediately take effect in some cases.
• Skipping tracks when paused would take 5 seconds to update the UI.
• Android: In some cases, cached files could become unplayable.
• Fix items downloading on cellular when disabled.
• Fix download quality check on cellular.
• Android: Improve usability of swipe removal of play queue items.
• Android: Remove unneeded phone permission.
• Android: Restore play queue when force killing the app.
• Android: Headphone controls didn’t always work when app was in background.
• Android: Fix crash changing playback speed.

[elan]

v3.1.1 for Workgroups

Added

• Android Auto!
• New Library tab with artist/albums/tracks/genres and more.
• Ultra-fast lists for library items (with alpha scrolling on mobile).
• Refresh downloaded items at app launch.
• Setting to show skip forward/back buttons for music.

Fixed

• Album codec badge sometimes showed bitrate for FLAC.
• Some album codec badges weren’t showing up properly.
• Ignore remote media items when computing download set.
• Desktop: Widen scrollbar to allow dragging.
• If no tracks download for an item, show error.
• Tweak album artist sort to order albums chronologically.
• EQ wasn’t active on launch even though it appeared to be.
• Don’t save TIDAL My Mixes to Recent Plays.
• TIDAL playlists weren’t showing tracks.
• Android: Store certs in data area, not cache.
• Android: Ducking when using AAudio interface wasn’t working.
• Playlist page was flashing header image every load.
• Always show bitrate for MP3 in album codec badge.
• Crash playing some AAC files.
• Failure to play some AAC files.
• iOS: Improve CarPlay performance and reliability.
• iOS: Fix CarPlay Recent Play items for Mix Builder and Charts playback.
• A rare race condition which could result in infinite buffering.
• Fix Aural Fixation issues around incorrect headers.
• Give “Best Of” fixation its own timespan setting.
• iOS: Request play queues for pre-caching with HTTP compression.
• Fix 100% CPU issue on desktop/Android reading some play queues.
• Show bitrate for codecs other than MP3 on album badge.
• Artist track carousel leads to new lists with context line.
• Desktop: Playback speed control was mostly broken.
• Show unwatched episode count as subtitle.
• Minimizing and maximizing player led to slowdown.
• Look further ahead when skipping to next album.
• Fix hang when switching to playlist type.
• Fix crash when going to artist from some TIDAL tracks.
• Moving item to top in TIDAL playlist didn’t work.
• A few reported crashes.

[elan]

v3.2.0

Android: live in store
Desktop: live
iOS: live

Added

• Casting (to Chromecast on mobile, Plex and Sonos players).
• Android Auto: Add tri-state rating actions in player.
• New “Car View” appearance preference to show simplified controls while driving.
• New “Keep Screen On” appearance preference to keep screen on while in player.
• Speed up downloads for offline by a factor of 2-3x in many cases.
• New setup flow with inline user/password sign-in.
• Add rating display to play queue items.
• Android: Close modal menus on back button.
• Lots of improvements to the Related tracks tab.
• Improved swipe-to-delete behavior.
• Android: Use translucent status bar.
• iOS: Hide status bar in player for that clean feeling.
• New play queue button in player to get below the fold.
• Larger album art on some iOS devices.
• Add playlist summaries (e.g. for TIDAL playlists).
• Add “Go to Album on TIDAL…” action for tracks added to library.
• BlurHash support (requires newest server).
• Grid view option for artists and albums.
• Collections and Compilations on Library screen.
• iOS: New Siri “Play library radio” command.
• Sorting tracks by add date.
• Desktop: Volume control in cast menu.

Fixed

• Android: Handle multi-window mode better, don’t restart when resized.
• Next button could be improperly disabled (e.g. Android Auto).
• Handle rating of exactly 5.0 in tri-state.
• Improve home screen error message when offline.
• Reload home data when coming back online after short outage.
• Confirm deletion of offline items.
• Mono audio files converted to Opus resulted in audible glitches.
• iOS: When playing something new, the CarPlay player might not show up.
• Make the play queue header buttons easier to tap.
• Android: Notifications could get out of sync with playback.
• Android: Improved performance with notifications.
• Android: Show album title on smaller screens and tablets.
• In RELATED tracks, show least recently played highly rated tracks first.
• Fix a few minor PQ pre-caching issues.
• Improve jump bar behavior (one item letters weren’t shown).
• Android: Bios and reviews could have their last line cut off.
• TIDAL or Podcasts only sign in works.
• Fix highly rated tracks not appearing on artist page (thanks DJ!).
• Fix rated (but unplayed) tracks showing up in most played tracks page of artist.
• Desktop: Improve search focus behavior.
• Precaching kicked off repeatedly in some cases.
• Prefer stream bitrate for player display, it’s more accurate.
• Don’t recommend low-rated tracks in RELATED.
• Desktop: don’t start a drag with right click.
• Desktop: fix crash when dragging.
• Fix cropping on 100th aural fixation.
• Fix poster alignment in landscape.
• When last playlist isn’t valid, properly remove from menu.
• Don’t refresh downloads on cellular start if download on cellular disabled.
• Android: Fix crash in visualizer on some devices.
• Desktop: Tweak size of drag header.
• iOS: Make posters a bit smaller on iPad.
• iOS: Try to improve resuming after Bluetooth reconnection.
• Desktop: Fix queue spacing glitch resizing player window.
• Cropping on album charts.
• Alphabet jump bar could stop working in some cases.
• Tweak spacing of tab bar on iOS.
• Increase size of poster in player in some cases.
• In some rare cases media was transcoded instead of using cached copy.
• iOS: A few cases where Siri shortcuts didn’t work.
• CarPlay/Android Auto: Artist radio action wasn’t working.
• Don’t show shuffle action for stations in recent plays.
• Fix spacing/sorting on genres/styles album lists.
• Fix rare case where restarting app resumes previous track.
• Restore playback speed.
• Improve download defaults for playlists.
• Desktop: Improve tab translucency in light mode.
• Extra spacing in library when sorting by album artist.
• Showing “undefined plays” on charts.
• Android: Make audio ducking just reduce volume and not pause.
• A few crashes with downloaded content menus.

[elan]

(updated placeholder with full release notes)

[elan]

v3.2.1

Android: released
Desktop: released
iOS: released

Added

• Sleep timer.
• Record label section on library tab.
• iOS: Support for Dynamic Type.
• Android: Support for font size setting.

Fixed

• When stopping playback, let the server know.
• Keep elapsed/remaining times in sync.
• Desktop: Sometimes play queue header would become unselected.
• Crash in signup step with external browser.
• Concurrent Plexamp sessions could collide with each other in the dashboard.
• Add title grouping to a few of the smart playlists the onboarding flow creates.
• When adding smart playlists in onboarding, also add summaries.
• Downloads would try to refresh when completely offline.
• Downloads would count TIDAL content in mixed playlists.
• Android: Better notification/service behavior.
• Speed up connection testing at app start.
• When casting, playing TIDAL content added to library didn’t work.
• Attempt to fix blurry setup screens on desktop.
• Desktop: Regression around spacing in small vertical layouts
• Fix theming on player dismiss button.
• Android: Some ALAC files failed to play.
• Android: Improve interruption handling, avoid starting playback “randomly”.
• Casting to Roku app wasn’t working.
• Desktop: Improve vertical spacing in portrait.
• Desktop: Fix titles centering issue at very tiny landscape sizes.
• Android: Improve layouts at “card” sizes (i.e. the Reddit issue).
• Android: Fix seekprint not working sometimes.
• Fix alignment of codec badges on album screen.
• Android: Don’t reload app when system theme changes.
• Last item in the cast popup was un-clickable.
• A few reported crashes.

[elan]

v3.2.2

Android: released
Desktop: released
iOS: released

Added

• Show (tappable) artist on album pages.
• Desktop: Enable jump letter bar.
• Play/shuffle actions on library screens.
• Desktop: ‘x’ key stops playback.
• Desktop: ESC key closes modals/menus.
• Desktop: Space toggles play/pause.

Fixed

• Make Plexamp show up correctly with version and name in devices list.
• In setup, moving back from playlists to library picker broke flow.
• Cast: If receiver stops running on Chromecast, disconnect.
• Cast: Avoid aggressive reconnection if another app takes over Chromecast.
• Improve title on library sub-screen context menu.
• When reconnecting to paused cast session, player might not appear.
• Record label album lists could incorrectly include albums from other labels.
• Android: Allow volume control while casting via hardware buttons.
• Android: Stop the app from always resuming playback when reconnecting to Bluetooth.
• Android: Fix text input widget cropping at small font sizes.
• Android: Improve play/pause commands from Bluetooth devices.
• Casting TIDAL albums in library to Chromecast wasn’t working.
• Fix displaying some short tracks as 0:00 duration.
• Tweak icon on Mix Builder search results.
• Avoid cropping track numbers at large font sizes.
• Improve text truncation on album pages.
• Desktop: Disallow mouse scrolling across play queue carousel.
• Desktop: Fix paging dots on artist screen carousels.

[elan]

v3.3.1

Android: released
iOS: released
Desktop: released

Added

• Repeat one mode
• Repeat all mode
• AutoPlay
• Context menu for Back To items to allow rating and more.
• Add to Library action for TIDAL tracks.
• Desktop: Configurable global keybindings

Fixed

• After removing play queue item, next tap on play queue track was ignored.
• Don’t show tracks which have never been played in History.
• iOS: Fix a few issues with playback not resuming (including when switching between outputs rapidly).
• Fixed typo in settings: “Adverse”.
• Play/Shuffle all for TIDAL artists/album/tracks didn’t work.
• Style/Mood stations on artist page didn’t always work.
• Don’t show play queue zero state when repeating.
• Artist track carousel items had extra left margin.
• TIDAL playlists page showed bogus title sort option.
• Playlists screen showed bogus play/shuffle controls.
• When refreshing dumb playlists, new items are always downloaded up to 24h limit.
• Offline playback could cause incorrect plays to show in dashboard/history.
• Mobile: Sleep timer sometimes wouldn’t fire.
• Allow track number of zero (weird, but hey).
• Allow offline playback to work even if source server vanished.
• Make prev button go to track start in first five seconds of play queue.
• Avoid saving incomplete files (can lead to e.g. corrupted images in cache).
• Improve secondary titles of cast devices.
• Bluetooth/Control center previous button would always skip to previous track.
• The “Add to Playlist” and “Add to recent playlist” actions were offered for server tracks in TIDAL context.
• Offline: Fix a case where a download could continue to fail.
• Occasional glitch in soft fade-outs when skipping tracks.
• Grids of playlists occasionally showed vertical misalignment.
• Android: Avoid crashing when Google Play services aren’t available.
• When playback results in empty play queue, don’t hang on gray player screen.
• Mix Builder multi-artist radios only included first artist.
• Reduce fade out time when skipping/stopping.
• Downloading radios or mixes could destroy local play queue.
• Some AIFF files didn’t show sample/bits in codec badge.

[elan]

v3.3.2

(Adding this one which only went out to Android, all these changes will be included in the next release for iOS and desktop.)

Android: released

Added

• Desktop: Improve album title appearance in vertical player layouts.
• Android: Fix crash with notification.
• Show time as mouse/finger interacts with seekprint.
• Allow seeking to start of track by dragging before start of track.
• Add new “Similar Album” AutoPlay card.

Fixed

• Desktop: Update PQ size as window size changes.
• Don’t report initial paused state when app starts.
• Improve title of “Best of” aural fixation downloads.

[elan]

v3.4.0

This is our big for you all!

The most notable addition is the powerful new library filtering/playlist builder. We hope you enjoy using it as much as we enjoying building it. (And don’t worry, smart playlist editing/deleting is coming soon as well, we just couldn’t wait to get this out for you to play with before the end of the year.)

Android: released
Desktop: released
iOS: awaiting review

Added

• Powerful filtering in library screens
• Allow creating smart playlists
• Allow downloading filtered library views
• Desktop: Add keyboard shortcut support for skip forward/back.
• Allow tracks to be “played next” without a play queue.
• Android: Allow installation on internal/external storage
• Folder mode
• Grid layout for tracks inside library.
• AutoPlay: Add DJ selections to Recent Plays.

Fixed

• Desktop: Allow keyboard mapping Page Up/Down keys.
• Don’t show container/codec until player reports it (fixes occasional glitch).
• Display hours/minutes when duration of album is over two hours, not days/minutes.
• Desktop: Don’t space out letter jump bar with tall window sizes.
• Hide buttons on the action bar when window gets sized down.
• AutoPlay: Don’t include artists themselves on “similar artists” card.
• Don’t spin endlessly when trying to download an artist radio without tracks.
• Cleanup offline directory in case there are stray/disconnected files.
• In some cases, player time (e.g. notification/iOS home screen) would be incorrect.
• Desktop: Don’t send redundant notifications e.g. during resize.
• Desktop: Fix visual glitch at top left when resizing window.
• Stop rounding/shadowing posters in mini-player.
• Offline popup on tablets was too big.
• Playing track 1 of non-first discs on CarPlay/Android Auto didn’t work.
• Text color in black theme.
• A rare case where offline playback would show up as something else entirely on server.
• In some cases, external artist/album recommendations would show first and then disappear.
• Improve text size for artist link on album page.
• AutoPlay: Similar artists card could sometimes return collections.
• Android: Ask for activity recognition permission.
• Android: Listen for play/pause toggle commands too.
• Fix buffering progress for Opus streams with non-standard conversion bitrates.
• Tracks would re-send their ratings for no good reason from Related Tracks.
• Spacing between More and Reset buttons in Related Tracks was wrong.
• Some M4B files failed to play when not fully cached.
• Android: Rare crash on start.