Some of thoughts about Plexamp / Wishlist

After using Plexamp a lot for the past couple of years I thought I’d write some thoughts about it. Some of the thoughts are perhaps more of a library thing than a Plexamp thing, but they work closely together… :slight_smile:

Firstly, Plexamp is for the most part very good. I like what it does a lot. Being able to listen to my own music on any device I use without hassle is very, very nice. It works as well as Spotify, but with my own music. Sonic analysis is fantastic and I love being able to just pick a track and play “something like this” without having to put much thought into it.

Then I’m going to jump into the point of this thread.

I’d very much like to be able to view an entire play queue more often. For example, when I’m playing a 4 disc album I’d like to be able to scroll the entire list of tracks. I don’t like how the height of the window is what determines how many tracks I’m able to view in the queue. Let me at the very least scroll no less than 100 tracks regardless of window height? Add a “jump to top” button when scrolling past a certain point if you are concerned about excessive scrolling. For generated playlists the current limits are fine.

Sweet fades are neat, but a flaw I find is that they don’t really work well with long intros and outros. Some tracks feature very long somewhat quiet segments at the beginning or end of the tracks, and I find Sweet fades a bit annoying then you get something like 40 seconds of overlapping between tracks (I haven’t timed it to be honest, but it feels long sometimes). When the fades are not too long I like them a lot, but It’s sort of annoying getting a long outro and a long intro overlapping, which happens every now and then. I’d like to have a more sane upper limit for a fade duration.

The auto generated playlists are neat, but I kind of wish to have the ability to let the queue consider the sonic analysis when building a playlist. For example playlists like “fresh tracks” or “loved tracks”. These are populated by tracks I’ve rated but don’t really consider what kind of music they are. All of them are tracks I like a lot, but jumping from metalcore to new age and then into dubstep can make for a rather jarring listening experience. I’d really love it if, at least, when I shuffle these kinds of playlists there’s given at least some weight to the sonic analysis data to make the playlists flow a bit better from track to track. I don’t think the library radio does any kind of consideration of what music is being played when picking tracks either?

I absolutely loathe how I cannot opt out of certain online features, while keeping others. For example the feature of syncing ratings on “the same” track across several albums. I’ve had some experiences where a live version and an album version has been linked. Is this the same track or a different track? I’m sure people will have different opinions about this, and I don’t want to fight with people on the internet about how my library should link tracks. I just want to turn the feature off. I don’t care for it and if I rate a track, I’m rating that particular version of the track. Not the re-release from the re-recorded album, nor the live version, for example. I don’t consider this the same track, but I’d imagine a lot of people will. This is also a particularly big issue with soundtracks. Take for example Aerith’s Theme from FFVII. There’s a ton of different versions and arrangements of the track, but if I want to rate the version from the original soundtrack it also rates a bunch of other versions of it. Just let me turn it off. Please. Let me manage how my own library behaves.

I’m sure I forgot some things I’ve been thinking about when using Plexamp over the last couple of years, but I think these are my biggest “complaints” at the moment.

And at what point is Plexamp no longer an “Experimental Labs” feature, but an actual baseline Plex Feature? We’re at version 4 of the app now. :smiley:

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We’d definitely like to offer this.

The maximum now is 25 seconds. Could be convinced it could be 15-20 instead.

We have ideas…

This seems like a metadata issue, those two ratings should definitely not be linked. Musicbrainz provides different “recordings” for these.

For all practical purposes…

Thanks for your thoughts and feedback!

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It sure felt longer sometimes. :joy:
I think 15 seconds sound like a good limit, from my experiences. (Ideally the algorithm should be “smarter”, but that seems… complicated to figure out.)

I like ideas. I hope they turn into features in a not too far off future. Cheers! :slight_smile:

Metadata issue how? I’m pretty sure the tags should be correct, and the album tag is clearly not the same.

Thanks for taking the time to read my thoughts!

The “tags” do not uniquely identify recordings. We use Musicbrainz for that (in a modern music library, which I assume you have; if you have Personal Media agent or something like that, you’re on your own…)

I’m using a modern library, yes. And the Plex Music scanner/agent. It’s prefering local metadata wherever possible though.
That being said I can’t find any tracks linked “wrongly” currently. None of the Final Fantasy tracks seems to sync the rating to a track from a different album at the moment. Maybe someone has cleaned up the online data making the matches better in my local library? :thinking:
I feel a bit stupid using examples that are no longer faulty now… :sweat_smile:

Plex won’t change how this behaves anytime soon, is how I interpret your answers. I guess it’s not the end of the world, but I’d still prefer to turn it completely off.

And shouldn’t need to, because Musicbrainz is a source of Good Data. Glad your bad data disappeared.

Would love to see Plexamp ported to Roku

This would make Plex the best

Sorry, Roku does not provide the platform capabilities we would need. Not even close…

Well, there could be reasons why someone might want to not follow the “correct” tags in every scenario, because of limitations in the library of Plex itself (or even personal preference). One struggle I have with a lot of the anime music I have is when voice actors are singing “in character” and are labeled as such, but for simplicity I want them placed as the actual real person.

For example Release group “Los! Los! Los!” by ターニャ・デグレチャフ(CV:悠木碧) - MusicBrainz
This is Aoi Yuki (or 悠木碧), but performing as her character “Tanya Degurechaff” (or ターニャ・デグレチャフ) from the anime.
This is labeled as “Tanya Degurechaff (CV: Aoi Yuki)” in the artist field if done properly.
This means it’s hard to follow the correct tags and still keep all releases of Aoi Yuki under her name in the library, because Plex has no way of dealing with these cases properly atm. Plex can’t do multiple artists, and who knows when or if it ever will.
I have gathered a lot of these kinds of singles (almost a thousand opening and ending singles so far) over the many, many years I’ve been watching anime and I don’t really want hundreds of fictional people that have 1 single release in my library. It’s very messy imho, and complicated to deal with. For my own sanity I have chosen to use the actual person as “artist” and “album artist” in these cases. It most certainly often is not in line with the proper tags in the Musicbrainz database, as they are not the “correct” ones.

(Often you end up with these abominations I’ve just given up on ever linking to actual people and put as “various artists” as album artist: https://musicbrainz.org/release/2f39d387-131f-45fa-ba45-a0d330a8b93a)

I’ve also opted for not using the Japanese kanji in my library and instead use the Latin alphabet, because otherwise it’s a massive PITA to find things on devices like my phone. The Musicbrainz database does have these aliases in the database a lot of the time, but not always. Some times they are translated into English and sometimes it’s just Japanese written with the Latin alphabet.

Real life is a lot of compromises, unfortunately, and I would greatly appreciate if Plex acknowledged that just a little bit more sometimes and gave their users some needed flexibility when managing their own music. :slight_smile:

I wonder if Adriana will see your post. It sounds like a challenge that Plex has considered.

I found myself the other day trying to understand how to craft a set of IDv3 tags to avoid all the “Tweety of Versailles (feat. Snoopy)” type titles when that track has two artists. Whether it’s commas or slashes that separate artists and their sort order is about where I got bored, but I got it to work.

I definitely agree users need more flexibility to manage their abominations.
We all have one in the family :slight_smile:

That is a shame. The Plex player works better on roku than other platforms i

If that is the case, it’s because it has a dedicated team of talented engineers working on a completely separate app, given that the Roku platform has its own custom development stack. Plexamp would have to be rewritten from scratch, and none of us are gong to do that.

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I realise Plexamp is for local music, but the “radio” features got me wishing we could add custom url’s

I suddenly remembered something I forgot in my initial post. When I’m connecting to an external player (for example from Plexamp on Android to the Android TV app) I want better control over how playlists are bounced between the players. If I still have a playlist on my phone, but connect to my TV when it’s currently playing it’s own queue the playlist from my phone will overwrite the currently playing list in the TV. Sort of annoying. Maybe it’s something obvious I’m missing, but from what I can tell unless I clear the local playlist I can’t manage the remote one, as the local queue is moved to the external player. I know I can do some basic controls without fully connecting, but I’d like to be able to fully connect to a remote player without overwriting the currently playing queue. At least give me a promp to choose which playlist I want to keep. :slight_smile:

in case you didn’t know, you can hold down the pause button to clear out the local play queue before connecting.

Maybe I want to continue the one on my phone later? :joy:

(It’s a useful tips for some scenarios though, thanks!)

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