So, after 48 hours my server finally completed churning through my collection and I have to say, on first impression, the mixes the Sonic Analysis produces are interesting and useful.
But right now, they’re only available within PlexAmp and we know PlexAmp doesn’t run on, say, a NVidia Shield. There’s no access to mixes in the Plex Android app. It’s not exposed in the web interface either; not the local one currently distributed with PMS, nor the online version. It doesn’t even appear on PlexAmp sideloaded to a Shield.
You can cast it from PlexAmp to a Shield but that loses Smooth Fades and Volume Normalisation, and casting to the Plex App on the Shield just doesn’t work - never has.
So, it took us over a year of plugging away to even get Smooth Fades and Volume Normalisation exposed on the Plex App on Shield - what are the chances that those of us who like to listen to our Plex-curated music collections through our sound systems connected to our TVs will ever get to use the fruits of day and days of Sonic Analysis processing?
Nope. I’ve initialized the Super Sonic Analysis…wited days for the analyzing to finish, ensured PlexAmp and Plex Media Server are up to date (PlexAmp 3.5 on MacOSx and Plex Media Server 1.24.1.4931), Emptied Trash, Refreshed Metadata, and ReScanned Library on my Music Library.
Are you sure the analysis is complete?
Keep in mind you need to enable the sonic features in 2 places:
Settings > [Server Name] > Library > Analyze audio tracks for sonic features must be set to As a scheduled task or As a scheduled task and when media is added
per library: ⋮ > Manage Library > Edit... → Advanced > Sonic Analysis checked
Key question is: did the analysis finish? You won’t see any of those features before that job is done.
Side question… on what platform is your PMS running? Sonic features are not available on all of them…
It’s worth noting that if you connect to your local plex server, it doesn’t show anything in the dashboard for Sound Analysis. You need to go to plex.tv/web to see if it’s still running.
I hope you’re right. But it took over a year of badgering to get Smooth Fades and Volume analysis exposed in the Android TV client (even though it’s exactly the same piece of software as runs on a mobile) so I’m not holding out too much hope we’ll see it anywhere else, any time soon…
I found that the analysis didn’t start running until I went to plex.tv on a different machine (other then the server) and randomly picked a song to play. Then I immediately saw the animation on the Activity icon. When I click on that icon I can finally see that Sonic Analysis is running:
For a few days I had waited for the analysis to start running during the normal maintenance window, but that apparently never happened.
And on the server machine I still see no indication of the process running. I only see that indication on the other machine.
Like you @K9Damien I have enabled Sonic analysis in both the settings areas. The Sonic analysis started but I’m unsure if it has stopped prematurely (it ran for at least 2 days)… is there a way to check if the Sonic analysis has completed successfully or not?
My Plex server is running on an Asustor AS6404T NAS.
When I go onto PlexAmp on my iPhone I cannot see any Sonic features like “Sonically Similar Artists” and “Mixes for You” and “On This Day”.
I’m a NAS newbie, so if someone can guide me to how to get a look into which logs on the Asustor NAS I’d be very grateful!
Hmmm… reading other posts I saw someone suggest to perform a “Scan Library Files” on my music library… which seems to have triggered the Sonic Analysis to resume! Fingers crossed it completes successfully. It’ll be annoying if I can’t find a way to know it has completed successfully and have to continuously perform Scan Library Files to check!
@K9Damien Looks like it’s done! Only had a quick look at PlexAmp on my iPhone but found the “Mixes for You” and “Similar Artists” feature… pretty cool… will report more when I get a chance to look for the other “Sonically Similar” and “On This Day” features!
