Hey all,
Been trying to find an alternative to Google Play Music for dealing with my music library on my phone, thought it was finally time to try the music pro features of plex and see how it stacks up, here’s what I noticed:
Pros:
- plex respects my transcoding settings, and never delivers me low quality music, unlike Play Music, which will sometimes deliver low quality mono audio even when it’s set to “force high quality”.
- plex does a better job generating instant playlists from a song.
- plex does a better job handling album art and metadata, where Play Music often doesn’t transmit album convers, or transmits randomly wrong ones.
- don’t have to constantly re-upload my library the Google’s cloud and wait for that sync to happen, since my plex server is local to my media collection.
Cons:
- plex for android often crashes while streaming when cell service is briefly lost. this is super
- plex doesn’t seem to do any sort of caching of music that’s already been played, or music up ahead in the playlist, so temporary of data service means loss of music playback.
- plex doesn’t let me configure the audio codec to use for transcoding/streaming, and it doesn’t seem to be using the current best-in-class codec (Opus) by default, so it requires a lot more bandwidth (~192kbps vs ~80kbps) to get decent quality music, which results in a lot of stuttering and buffering in ■■■■■■ coverage areas.
I really wanna ditch Play Music, so I’m hoping that by bringing this stuff up, we can get them into a product roadmap and sometime before the end of the year I can actually make the switch. I think the Pro Music offering with plex pass has a lot of potential, but it just doesn’t feel usable yet compared to other mobile options.
