What: Add an option to share the results of Sonic Analysis of your library to matched albums/songs to Plex’s cloud, then allow other Plex Pass subscribers to download these analyses.
Why: Sonic analysis is a very time intensive task. Having a cloud-sourced repository of crowd-generated analyses for matched files would reduce the barrier to entry (time) for Sonic Analysis and all of Plexamp’s awesome features for people entering the ecosystem. Valve have effectively done this with pre-compiled shader caches for the Steam Deck and it works brilliantly.
I second this! This was my first thought after enabling sonic analysis and seeing how unbelievably slow it is. As the documentation admits, this is a CPU intensive operation, and the result of this operation appears to be reusable. This would make it an ideal candidate for caching.
Plex PMs, please pay attention to this request - this would massively improve the usability of the sonic analysis feature. Currently, it is too slow for my purposes, and it’s the main reason I bought Plex Pass. This performance is what I would expect from a feature in beta, not from a paid generally available feature!
With regards to implementation, for clients to find the right analysis result from the cache, there are several options I can think of for a lookup key, with varying levels of precision:
- the file’s metadata (simplest and lightest option, but requires the metadata to be correct to work well)
- audio fingerprint (best middleground option IMO, depending on how expensive fingerprinting is)
- hash of the file (best precision, but much more likely to result in cache misses and consequently near-identical data being stored in the cache)
All this is to say that this should be very doable, and again, it would drastically improve the usability of this feature!
