Hi there, thank you very much for the plexamp app, it is something I have been wanting for years, and it is wonderful. One thing that I would really like to see however is improvements to the cache/download mechanism.
First off, it’s not immediately clear to me if when I download a playlist it will automatically play the downloaded copy if select it from the main menu. I think it would be great if the Download mechanism essentially just cached the songs, so that whenever any song in a downloaded playlist/album/radio was played, it plays the cached version.
Secondly, I have a smart playlist with all songs rated 5 stars, with about 2 days worth of music. The download interface limits that’s that 1 day, and when I refresh it seems to select a new random subset of songs. So, building on the first suggestion, it would be great if we could just flag an item to say “cache this”, and play everything from the main menu. Doing this way, we can limit the cache size through the interface you already have (but maybe get rid of the 16gb limitation) and the whole process for listening to music will be the same whether using data or not.
Basically, I don’t really ever want the app to use any mobile data. If I’m on wifi it’s not a big deal, but for driving and such it would be ideal if everything could just play locally.
Thank you again for making this app, it really is fantastic.
We’ll be adding that facility in the future where it prefers a downloaded copy over a “live” one to reduce bandwidth usage.
One really cool thing you can do is to add another clause onto that smart playlist like “not played in last 2 months”. That way you can use the download page-level refresh, and it’ll move tracks in and out as you consume them, which is essentially like a sliding window into a much larger playlist.
And yeah, that does make sense. I actually do have a filter like that on there already but only for the past couple days. I normally keep music on all day during work, so mainly just wanted to not hear the same stuff back to back, but I’m also pretty basic when it comes to music so within the same week or so is fine for me.
So I will probably end up expanding my time window as you’ve suggested, and/or start adjusting some ratings down to 4 stars to get within that 24 hour time limit just so I can have my favorites. In these days of quarantine I’m rarely off WiFi anyways, so its not current a huge issue, but if I ever start driving for long periods of time again something like this might push me back to og Plex app. Would be a tough call though, because plexamp is just infinitely better.
So thanks for listening! And again, thanks for making this app, it really is fantastic.
So, I noticed you added the option for “Prefer Downloaded Media”. Thanks for that! But wondering if you could explain how that works? I have a smart playlist with > 24hours of songs. I also have that playlist downloaded up to the maximum of 24 hours. If I set that option to cellular and I select my playlist from the home screen, will that automatically use the downloaded playlist? Or, will it play the entire playlist, and when it comes across songs that exist in the downloaded copy use the downloaded version? Thanks in advance.
Also, I am still struggling with shifting my mindset to enjoy this time limit restriction on downloads. For the Live Stations, which was not a perspective I had considered before, being able to select the amount of time you want to download is unique and really quite genius, so kudos for that.
For other music though I’m less enthused. I used DSUB/Subsonic for a time, and one of the really great things about that app was its complete blurring of local/remote streaming. Rather than having a separate section for Downloads, you could pre-cache whatever you want, and whether you were on cellular/wifi/no data, if you had a cached copy of that song it would use that. You could pre-cache your entire library, or whatever subsets you wanted. I’m not sure if something like this is on your roadmap or how it would really fit in with your design, but since you do already have a caching mechanism in place something like this would be really cool.
One other thing that could really help would be if we could automatically refresh downloads. As per your instructions to just add a “date played” filter to the smart play list, it would be great if this could be automatically refreshed on user-defined interval. It is a small thing, but manually refreshing is just less than ideal. Any plans on adding this?
Anyways, thanks for listening, and thanks again for the awesome app.
