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…
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.