TL;DR: Stripping music out of the main app and then not releasing Plexamp for major platforms like Roku is a serious problem. Is Plexamp actually coming for Roku, and if so, when? Plex’s decision that music is a second-class citizen has broken the “living room media hub” use case, and has me looking for alternatives.
Why has Plex decided to break the unified media experience in the Plex apps? It strikes me as a baffling choice that has seriously degraded user experience, at least for me. Per other posts, Plex wants to “focus on video,” but what about having music available in the main Plex app made the platform’s video management vision unachievable?
In addition to the perception - real or otherwise - that Plex now doesn’t care about music (bad news for those of us who use it to manage large music libraries), sloughing music off to Plexamp only has not been without significant downsides. One of my now-broken use cases is definitely marginal, but I cannot imagine the other one is. Ignoring the one I know is uncommon, the more serious issue is the smart TV side of things. If you have a Roku, you’re SOL if you use Plex to manage and play your music.
Am I the only person on the planet who uses Plex as an overall media hub via a smart TV, in this case a Roku? I use the Plex app on Roku, which is plumbed in through my A/V receiver. Other than a BD player, the Roku is the only thing plugged in to that receiver and everything runs through it - and through Plex. Music or movies or TV shows or audiobooks, if I want it on the stereo, it goes through the TV and Plex. Or it used to. Now it can’t.
Since Plex’s decision to just strip music from the main Plex app, I no longer have the ability to listen to music through my A/V receiver. Yes, there are workarounds - I can use Plexamp on my phone and stream it over bluetooth, but that isn’t exactly low-friction. I can get a different Roku app to hit my NAS and list out my music library, but that as the same problem (and besides, at that point, why am I using Plex for music? Does Plex even want me to?). Plex went from being the hands-down, no-arguments, absolute best app in the entire Roku ecosystem to a bloated mess, but that was forgivable so long as it worked. Now they’ve removed an entire operational class and left users with nothing.
Setting aside that divorcing non-video content from video content within the app is a higher-friction and overall worse user experience (why do I have to fully context-switch to different apps for different media types, when I never had to before), why did Plex make this change without ensuring parity for a massive device class like Roku by having Plexamp be available for the platform? Roku is not a small platform, and it has been flat-out abandoned by Plex as far as music is concerned.
Am I the only person who uses his smart TV to run the living room stereo? How was this missed? When will it be fixed, in some manner? I don’t like the answer, “just use Plexamp for music” because it breaks one of Plex’s killer features, which was a unified media experience - an experience arbitrarily and thoughtlessly destroyed by removing music from the main Plex app. My distaste for that answer aside, I will (and have, on mobile) accept it - but in order to accept that answer, the app has to actually exist and it doesn’t.
Is Plexamp actually coming for Roku, and if so, when? Plex’s decision that music doesn’t matter has broken the “living room media hub” use case, and has me looking for alternatives.
