Plexamp has some weird limitations, but it is great. The AI features were strong enough to pull me from foobar2k.
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
33 points (97.1% liked)
Plex
2401 readers
2 users here now
Welcome to Plex, a community dedicated to Plex, the media server/client solution for enjoying your media!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I use Plexamp exclusively. At my desk, in my car on the homes Sonos system.
All Plexamp all the time.
I do, but I am bitter that my server doesn't allow access to plexamp for anyone but me the server manager.
I personally bought Plex Lifetime Pass for my family use, I would not have bought it just for personal use. The only outcome of plexamp behind pass for every single user is that I get less out of my server, my family are never going to pay A$6.00 per month to rent a music app with only my music.
At least with Symfonium I can buy the app outright, if all my family members were on Android we'd go that option.
I'm pretty sure that if you add your family to your Plex Home then they'll get access to Plexamp
You can make user profiles for your family members so they fall under your plex pass. Worked for my house so far.
Not sure if you've seen the recent announcement but plexamp is free now. They've changed their approach and instead of the whole app being restricted to plexpass users, you can now use some features for free while the more advanced features are still locked to plexpass users. One big asterisks is that all the sonic analysis features will not work if the server owner doesn't have a plexpass.
Also, your family can definitely access your plexpass perks, you just need to add them to your "Plex home". I believe you can add up to 15 users to your home, just make sure you don't add them as "managed users" as that will require them to login with your account.
I had seen that today, I was already annoyed that one of my users can't cache/download from my server despite that not being a restriction for general server users at the time of purchase.
I was aware of the workaround, but as most of my users are outside my home, I did not want to bind their accounts to mine, I just wanted to share my personal server with their independent accounts.
I should be happy that today's addition is more than what we had yesterday, but I am still disappointed at what is an arbitrary restriction for the purpose of upselling to my users, something I had thought I had paid for future development of and is not useful or appropriate enough to justify the cost to them.
I had decided that I should pay for current and future feature development for my server and its users, I now feel that the features I payed in advanced for are being paywalled in a way that is unlikely to garner more income from my friends/families and only results in me getting less out of what I thought I paid for, personally I don't use my server as much as it was intended for those users.
I definitely agree with you that some of the restrictions feel very arbitrary (basically everything that doesn't use sonic analysis should be in the free tier imo). Especially with how bad of an experience music playback is without plexamp. Even as a lifetime plexpass users, I feel they shouldn't have offered it if it would lead to the situation we have today where they need to get "creative" with monetization since their core users only paid a one-time fee.
To clarify my earlier post, you can definitely allow them to keep their independent account even if they're in your Plex home. You just need to select "invite Plex user" instead of "create managed account". It's not a perfect solution as it gives all those users access to each other's accounts if no pin is set afterwards. That being said, I personally don't find that a huge limitation as I wouldn't share my server with anyone that I wouldn't trust to respect that. I added a pin only so no one accidentally logs in on my profile as it would give them admin access, all the devices I use regularly I also enable "automatically sign in" so I really only ever need to input my pin when I log into a new device.
I was enjoying plexamp but had no idea of the restrictions. My missus probably hadn't bothered to try it yet so we hadn't noticed.
Such a shame because plexamp seems to me superior to the experience from all other streaming apps, apart from my less than perfect music collection!
Will have to give this Symfonium a look!
You can just add users to Plex Home and then they can use all your Plex Pass features.
Thanks for clarifying!
I've used it for a while now. I will still probably use it on the desktop but for my phone/car I switched to Symfonium because of the stupid download restrictions of Plexamp. I like Symfonium well enough and it will also pull from Jellyfin if I ever fully get rid of Plex.
Plexamp has absolutely changed the way I listen to music. When I used foobar2000 and DeadBeef there wasn't a way I could listen to my music library on the go, so I had to use Spotify. Thanks to Plexamp I've got access to my consistent music library regardless of the device I'm using.
TBH I have a love hate relationship with plexamp but yes, it is my main music app. I will try streaming services, try to build out my profile so the algorithms will give me what I like but... nothing beats my own curated library sometimes. Though if they were to integrate Spotify/other music services like they did with Tidal that'd be amazing for when I want to discover more music!
I use Plexamp for both music and audiobooks.
I’ve tried using it before and while it’s usable on mobile I’ve always found the ui to be too unintuitive on desktop.
Managing a music collection got way too unwieldy for me about a decade ago and I switched to Spotify. What do you do when you want to listen to a random, one-off song or album? What about when you discover a new musician and you want to see what else they have? Are you queuing stuff up in lidarr all the time?
You can integrate Tidal with PlexAmp for exactly this use case
I use lidarr and have it set up to download new releases on Spotify, all my Spotify playlists and current top 100. I also have it set to download every available FLAC for every artist it’s adds, so it’s pretty easy for me to find new music using Plexamp.
This is a really interesting approach. How much space does your music library end up using?
Currently around 3TB with roughly 100k flac files
Dang! That's a lot of music.
I use it constantly on all my devices. Also, I have it setup headless on an Hifiberry streamer, connected to a Yamaha amp. It’s great!
I use it almost exclusively on my phone and my laptop.
This doesn't look like an advertisement /s
Arguably, this entire community could be considered an advertisement for Plex....