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Plexamp, Plex's Spin on the Classic Winamp Player, Is the First Project From New Incubator Plex Labs (techcrunch.com)
Media software maker Plex today announced a new incubator and community resource called Plex Labs. "The idea here is to help the company's internal passion projects gain exposure, along with those from Plex community members," reports TechCrunch. "Plex Labs is also unveiling its first product: a music player called Plexamp," which is designed to replace the long-lost Winamp. From the report: The player was built by several Plex employees in their free time, and is meant for those who use Plex for music. As the company explains in its announcement, the goal was to build a small player that sits unobtrusively on the desktop and can handle any music format. The team limited itself to a single window, making Plexamp the smaller Plex player to date, in terms of pixel size. Under the hood, Plexamp uses the open source audio player Music Player Daemon (MPD), along with a combination of ES7, Electron, React, and MobX technologies. The end result is a player that runs on either macOS or Windows and works like a native app. That is, you can use media keys for skipping tracks or playing and pausing music, and receive notifications. The player can also handle any music format, and can play music offline when the Plex server runs on your laptop.
The player also supports gapless playback, soft transitions and visualizations to accompany your music. Plus, the visualizations' palette of colors is pulled from the album art, Plex notes. Additionally, Plexamp makes use of a few up-and-coming features that will be included in Plex's subscription, Plex Pass, in the future. These new features are powering functionality like loudness leveling (to normalize playback volume), smart transitions (to compute the optimal overlap times between tracks), soundprints (to represent tracks visually), waveform seeking (to present a graphical view of tracks), Library stations, and artist radio.
The player also supports gapless playback, soft transitions and visualizations to accompany your music. Plus, the visualizations' palette of colors is pulled from the album art, Plex notes. Additionally, Plexamp makes use of a few up-and-coming features that will be included in Plex's subscription, Plex Pass, in the future. These new features are powering functionality like loudness leveling (to normalize playback volume), smart transitions (to compute the optimal overlap times between tracks), soundprints (to represent tracks visually), waveform seeking (to present a graphical view of tracks), Library stations, and artist radio.
(Subject asks it all.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
WinAmp's (default) UI was appropriate. Each button or knob or text field was exceptionally useful and well-placed.
PlexAmp looks like yet another mobile device interfaceless-interface where almost everything is buried in a burger menu or controlled by unintuitive gestures. But at least it has gradient fills everywhere there aren't transparent controls on full-colour bitmaps.
Do not want. Also, get off my goddamned lawn.
"Oh no... he found the
Great another app that eats half a gig of ram
A sig walks into a bar
I really can't trust any software now adays.
So far I really like Plex but lack of a Linux player is kind of annoying (yes I know I can go attempt to compile it from source, but I have better things to do than debug why my build environment doesn't match theirs).
Anyway, a music only version would be really cool but it needs a Linux version and proper support for managing transcoding of music. I do not want to stream flac over the internet - let me enforce max bitrates and such - manually defining a pre-define profile via the xml/settings is fine, just some way to not stream high bit rates files unless I really want to. And it does need a manual override, when on my VPN the player node appears local despite the limited bandwidth and doesn't trigger "internet mode".
That was the best thing about winamp. That and the llama...
that used winamp streaming server? I liked being able to stream the muzak over the internets.
first
It's a trap! They will phone every single bit of information to the mothership ("we promise, we won't sell it, until we change our mind")... Thanks, but no thanks...
Yes a GCHQ/NSA spy machine that chokes most of a core on a modern PC, plays only 'OFFICIAL' formats, and is a million times heavier than foobar2000 is just what I was looking for.
Funny, when as an old school windows users, I look for apps, I want them PORTABLE, tiny, lightweight (RAM and CPU), and fully focused on sane usage. I see no pleasure in badly coded apps that choke an entire system just so I can have toddler pleasing goo-goo graphic interfaces.
This year AMD gave us the astonishingly good 8-core Ryzen CPU. Do we want next year for apps to greedily steal all the cores like they do all the RAM today? Do we really want programs to DEVOLVE as dribblers rejoice in using these modern coding paradigms?
What is 'clever' with these web-style apps is not really clever at all when you care about quality and function. It's like one of those glossy expensive magazines- all style and no substance.
Thankfully, no one had to endure the savage ordeal of writing in a low-level language to assemble this pile of media-playing middleware. Phew!
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
Winamp still runs just as fine as it did nearly two decades ago. It plays mp3s and plays them well. End of story. A hammer purchased today still looks like a hammer from a millennia ago for a reason. Programmers need to learn that philosophy.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
lexamp, Plex's Spin on the Classic Winamp Player
Cool!
Under the hood, Plexamp uses the open source audio player Music Player Daemon (MPD)
So.. not related to Winamp whatsoever then. Maybe this is a decent player, maybe it's not, but if you aren't even using the same engine why reference the brand?
It's called courage. Wait. That's taken. It's called standing on principals. Yeah. In your face!
... the Llama's ass has passed. Let it go.
Jesus, do I really need a web browser and layers of JS frameworks to display an "unobtrusive" music player?
...definitely not a WinAmp replacement.
- sigs are stupid
No source code anywhere. Into the trash it goes.
If it doesn't stream from Google Play or Spotify, why would I want it? None of my music is stored locally, anymore.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Funny that cars are increasingly using Linux. Perhaps you should re-evaluate your stance?
But does it whip the Llama's ass?
Using Linux today (for general purposes) is like using steam powered cars after the combustion engine has been perfected.
Funny that cars are increasingly using Linux.
Though cars are using Linux, cars are not using Linux for general purposes in the sense of users being able to install arbitrary applications. The userland on top of car Linux is nothing like your typical X11/Linux userland.
Great another app that eats half a gig of ram
Which is especially dumb given "Literally the only requirement we had was 'small'." But until the overwhelming majority of PCs in use have double-digit GB of RAM, "small" contraindicates Electron unless you can plan on users being able to afford to add more RAM and possibly replace their motherboard and CPU (or in the case of a Mac or laptop, their whole computer) just to run one application without risk of thrashing swap on a machine with 8 GB or less of RAM.
So many retards on Slashdot these days. So many retards...
Also does anybody have a copy of that archive with a bunch of ambient science fiction rol files? I don't want to have to dig through my own archives...or find a floppy disk reader that works.
Plexamp is 45MB
Winamp is 10MB
But fuck it I got Foobar2000 (4MB)
When is the last time you looked at a new car? Most offer custom apps... most have UI better than X11... some are android and support the play store.
in short, you're an idiot.
Winamp is really defined by its whole plugins ecosystem, if it doesn't emulate Winamp Plugins, it's not Winamp.
Youâ(TM)d be surprised how much stuff runs held together by userland and init scripts after bog standard kernels boot.
As much as we try to glorify the best of the best engineers with technologies and possibilities that computers can provide, the majority of systems donâ(TM)t actually put it together that way.
I work with medical equipment. Iâ(TM)ve put in vendor plugins for RT processing of radiation dosage calculations that are a combination of bash, Python and Docker running the interface on an ancient Firefox connected via an X11 over SSH session.
Cars arenâ(TM)t any better. Itâ(TM)s weird sometimes that these things make it through any sort of QA.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Plex doesn't handle classical music properly. It doesn't even come close. Of course, nothing else does either, but holy fuck how hard is it to give us the option to key off the Composer, Soloist, Ensemble and/or Conductor tags instead of useless album and track titles?
Do something useful and fix THAT.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
This isn't Winamp or even near it. This is spam.
When is the last time you looked at a new car?
More than three years ago. The last new car I looked at was financed with a three-year loan and is now paid off. This places it before May 2015, the debut of Android Auto in the Hyundai Sonata.
Does it have plugins for all the various game music sound formats such as NSF, GYM, SPC, etc?
Twinstiq, game news
I like to fine tune the volume of my music when playing games. No such slider on this. Keep trying though plex team.
Winamp, I love you, Plex I love you Winamp + Plex = omg this is amazing
There's a lot of talk about memory footprints (which have always been very significant for me, although not anymore), and about modern features. The website mentions gorgeous features like transitions and visuals and polish of all sorts. I'm sure it's very good.
Here's the thing though:
I installed winamp twenty years ago. I've been through about 6 machines in that time, and aside from a ten-minute install-and-configure effort, I haven't even noticed winamp.
It's needed zero effort from me. I don't see it. It's a tiny little bar somewhere on my tertiary monitor, in the title-bar of my e-mail window. Global hotkeys are all I need. I don't see it. I don't want to see it. I don't need to see it. I can't even remember the last time I clicked on winamp for anything.
I've gone twenty years with the same (growing) library of local music. Some of these songs date back even longer. My first was a 50MB wave file recorded at a dos command line in 1992 on a 200MB hard drive, of don't worry be happy.
I don't need to care about how my music will or will not play, how to play it, or all-about-cover-art. It's been there for twenty years. My music that is. There's no problem to solve. I don't need audio to look good. I don't need keyboard shortcuts to be high definition. And if I want my music available from somewhere else, I have this button called "copy". 10GB fits just about anywhere, including my tiny phonebaby phone. My laptop won't notice 50GB. And my desktops won't notice 3TB. So really, there's no problem to solve here. Move on.
You do realize that pretty much every computer on the planet that isnt Windows is a UNIX variant, right?
Good-bye
Said software systems don't create punctuaion bugs that me the user's entered text look like shit, though, I supect. Apple isn't in that biz.
The player can also handle any music format,
Really? How about sheet music? Player piano punch cards?
Additionally, Plexamp makes use of a few up-and-coming features that will be included in Plex's subscription, Plex Pass, in the future. These new features are .. BIG BROTHER UNDER THE HOOD.
Software is now slavery.
Welp - I'm a Plex user, and I'd been after something to play my music... so... ideal...
Downloaded, installed. And off we go.
Program opens, but in an awkward spot. So I spend... a few minutes... trying to move the window. Growing increasingly frustrated, I give up and decide "Okay, fine. Let's just play... I don't know... some Nightwish. Yeah."
Where's the music explorer, or whatever it's called in this paradigm? I... want to play... Nightwish. "You can listen to Radiohead!". "Here's some Jeff Wayne!"
In the end, in frustration, I pull out the keyboard and search for Nightwish. I get Nightwish. Gah, but I don't want to play this song. I'd love some kind of 'list' that I can create of the music I wish to 'play'!
In desperation, I load up the help page for the program.
https://plexamp.com/#help
How do I move the app window?
The app can be moved once you choose something to play. While playing, simply click and drag in the top half of the album art/visualizer.
How do I browse my library?
Plexamp is not a normal Plex app in the sense that you're not intended to just straight "browse" a music library.
How do I change the volume?
There are no volume controls in the app itself. Instead, simply use the system volume controls on your computer.
Summary.
This is easily the best music app that required me to resort to an FAQ to move the window, play the music I wanted to hear, and decrease the volume.
It's nearly 45MB... there's some other shit in the download. Already know to keep it off my computer.
Don't worry its not good anyway. It needs to be signed in to work. It needs a server to be running and it takes up 160mb of ram. Thats a fail on all 3 fronts.
They say client/server, which could lead one to believe that they are using the Plex Media Server at the back end to provide the music stream (I've not tried the product). What they forget to tell, is that Plex do not allow uses to 100% switch off sharing information with Plex backend infrastructure, and that for the PMS Client (possibly not for the plexamp) an internet connection is required to login in and to use it. The Plex team is under fire for the privacy concern on the forums, but until now nothing much has change, and a number of users have moved to other platforms.
Linux is not a unix....
BSD is a unix.
"His name was James Damore."
it plays pretty much every music format there is, it's light on resources while still being extendable and easy to configure, and has the kind of look we expect music players to have. It's made WinAmp and others a thing of the past IMO.
About your signature / journal entry : are you saying it is possible that there may be no risk with being tracked by ad networks ?
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
This is along with various other bits and pieces that turn my MATE linux desktop into something that is virtually indistinguishable from Windows XP!
Why have I done this? I was bored the other night and there's something slightly amusing about running an i7 8700 CPU with 16gig RAM using Linux...all looking like an ancient Microshaft OS!
Currently plex forces you to sign in even to use your own local server so they can get Windows 10 style telemetry. They also have removed good features such as Detailed/List view in folder view.
No doubt, this product will eventually force you to sign in and spy on you.
Terrible idea. Currently you can't even use your own local plex server with out login / spying. Switched to Emby even though not as good, doesn't forced fuck your info to them.
I installed Plex years ago and I used it some, but what I didn't like was that it would just refuse to play certain files that it could, in theory, play. I looked for information and basically it came down to the fact that Plex actually had issues not with the content of the problem files but with their names. You could rename a file and Plex would then magically play it without issues. But nobody knew for sure what caused the name problem or exactly what fixed it. I found Plex to be more trouble than it was worth as it failed on about 20% of what I wanted it to play, but I wasn't paying anything for it so I could live with that. Then despite me not ever updating my supposed free version of Plex, the people behind it found a way to make the free one not work any more at all. Oh sure, I can now pay a subscription fee each month to use Plex, but I've never been able to find out if they ever fixed the name problem, so I'm going to pass.
I get that everybody doesn't care about this, but I liked about Winamp was that you could see the actual bit rate of a file as it played. If you had a VBR MP3 file, you could see what bit rates it was actually using at various places. It's the only program I've found that does that. So from what I can see it seems that this new one doesn't really display much of anything except the name of the song being somehow played (others here say you can't browse so I guess you have to drag and drop to get it to play anything) and some kind of weird semi-psychedelic image. Hard pass on this one. I wait for the day when Plex announces that you'll have to pay to keep using this because that is what they do.
At least gnu-linux's not Unix.
Meanwhile, my request for whole album FLAC/CUE support with Plex has been going on for years now. So if this is born of the same code, it won't be replacing Foobar2000 anytime soon.
are you saying it is possible that there may be no risk with being tracked by ad networks ?
You correctly understand phozz bare's claim. I was seeking a refutation thereof.
and it still kicks the llama's ass.
So you have no idea what you're talking about. Got it.
It's close enough for government work.
Literally: I was hired on as a civilian doing sysadmin work on Linux, and branched out from there to HPUX, AIX, and Solaris with very little trouble.
Ok, this should be obvious but I understand how obvious things can be difficult to prove. How about this outline, can expand a point if needed ?
1. Trend : Governments getting more and more power over citizens
2. Trend : Government representatives getting less answerable to citizens
1 + 2 means Governments can do more to citizens and citizens will know less about it
3. By tracking across internet, companies can acquire information about people.
4. Information, by massive data mining, can predict e.g. who one will vote for. With some error bars, as usual.
5. Governments can "ask" companies for this information and no one will be any the wiser. See 1 and 2.
6. Many elections are narrow - Governments have significant motivation to remain in power by just eliminating a few thousand , or tens of thousands strategically placed citizens per year.
7. If the near and dear ones , and associates of eliminated citizens are subtly warned - number of citizens to be eliminated can be reduced drastically.
Voila - elections become useless.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
I was very excited for this. Downloaded, and saw I needed to sign in with a Plex account in order to use it. I'm sure I could use an anonymous email address, but given the last Plex privacy debacle, I'm out. Yes, Plex did reverse their course after receiving significant backlash, but I don't want a music player that requires me to ensure the company hasn't changed privacy terms on a daily or weekly basis. That destroys the purpose of a simple player if I need to make a recurring calendar appointment to ensure they didn't decide to sell my data.
Even if they always keep a "good" privacy policy, the fact that I need an account means they have some of my data that hackers will eventually gain access to. I understand why Plex would want to force you to sign in and create an account as a business purpose, since they are trying to make money, but I'm upset that I had to waste a few minutes downloading, installing and setting up to realize it's unusable to me and deleted it.
I'm writing to give warning to other potential downloaders - you will need to sign up for a Plex account to use it. Also, as a message to Plex CTO who thinks blocking a free app behind the Plex account firewall is a good idea - there are many people who won't use it because of that, so your employees wasted time.
Instead of any kind of custom sound visualizations (that just look pretty but useless), I would want real-time graphing/analysis of sound in many different ways, like frequency vs volume etc
QMMP is more close to Winamp than Spin. And works very well in my opinion.
And it's open-source and cross-platform.
http://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/
I'm surprised no one has mentioned yet. I thought it was more popular.
https://www.xmplay.com/
Linux is not a unix.... BSD is a unix.
But, the grandparent's statement still stands true, Linux is a UNIX variant.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
applications that are a browser in disguise... terrible idea. even if it's a music player.
A hammer purchased today still looks like a hammer from a millennia ago for a reason.
"If you go through a lot of hammers each month, I don't think it necessarily means you're a hard worker. It may just mean that you have a lot to learn about proper hammer maintenance."
- Jack Handey
-kgj
Plexamp: it really licks the llama's ass!
Plex is a pile of crap IHO. I mean why do I need to use a third party account to watch my own videos. Those SS look ugly as balls. Not going to get me to change.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
You must log into something before you can use this. Fuck this noise. This is not a replacement for WinAmp in any way. Don't need an account to use WinAmp, and it still whips the llamas ass.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
I may be wrong, but this sounds more like an iTunes clone. Why should I rely on a server out of my control to play my music? Why does it need a server at all?
X11 isn't a UI, its a graphics server. It's huge and kludgy and yes it does run on GNU Linux.
The Linux kernel is the best performing OS kernel in the world. I Don't run Linux for Linux's sake, i run it for what i can do with it, which is whatever i want, privately. Have fun with Windows 10 sucker