To be clear, I absolutely love my PMS and think Plex is one of, if not the, best personal streaming platforms available for my use case (mostly music consumption, and I’m not paying Roon £700 for that). Compared to things like Emby and others I’ve tried, Plex just works more often, especially when it comes to metadata.
With that being said, I do have a few frustrations I’ve accumulated over the past few months of me using it; forgive me Plex devs, I hope you can take this as some feedback and if you have any problems with what I say here, let me know.
Updates
I’m going to start here by asking a question; why is automatic updating not available on Linux servers yet? From my experience, surely it’s a simple apt update && apt install plexmediaserver on Debian and Ubuntu machines? There are plenty of features unavailable on the Linux server, which is understandable - it’s a different operating system with less support in most places - but I don’t think this is a massive ask.
Secondly, and this is the more important niggle, is the state of bug-checking new updates. It is a good day when a PMS update doesn’t break something, somewhere. Whether that be something small like my music sorting by artist instead of album and not saving my settings when I change it back, or something bigger like completely breaking lyrics (although I commend you on how quickly you responded to my query), it’s incredibly frustrating to have to wait for an update to fix something that was working completely fine before.
Lyrics
I generally quite enjoy watching lyrics float past while listening to my music if it has it, and Plex does a relatively good job once I’ve clicked the button. And there’s my first frustration. Having to click the button to enable lyrics every time a track clicks over, while I understand is a cost-saving measure, is a bit annoying. I would be perfectly happy to pay an extra pound or two a month for my Plex Pass sub if these measures were removed, as I think it would make the experience a bit nicer.
Along with that, the use of LyricFind’s API is a little bit questionable to me. There are occasions when the API either doesn’t have lyrics for a song I want or has lyrics that are completely out of sync. Here’s a suggestion: allow us to pick the metadata from the API and choose one that matches the song we want, if it hasn’t been done successfully by Plex. Prime example of where that would’ve helped is when a song I added got given the complete wrong metadata and lyrics for another song.
Plexamp
Plexamp being a paid app and not being supported baffles me, honestly. That’s all that really needs to be said there.
Other than that, I’d love a Plexamp desktop app that is akin to the current Plex client when it comes to music, just with that beautiful Plexamp design. I appreciate that it was meant to follow in the footsteps of Winamp; I just think the design could work incredibly well on a full-blown desktop program.
Final Notes
Looking back up at that, I realise I’ve waffled on a bit and this post is rather long-winded. My apologies for that - if you’re reading this and haven’t skipped the entire post, thank you.
Again, I repeat what I said earlier; I love Plex. It works most of the time for what I need it to and is the cheapest and best for the money in it’s market. I hope that this post is seen as some constructive criticism. I appreciate that some things I’ve mentioned are a bit of an ask and, finally, I encourage you to a debate if you disagree with me on any of my points.
lol