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Plexamp, Plex's Spin on the Classic Winamp Player, Is the First Project From New Incubator Plex Labs (techcrunch.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the first-in-line dept.

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.

8 of 209 comments (clear)

  1. This doesn't look like it replaces WinAmp. by PsychoSlashDot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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 .sig setting."
    1. Re:This doesn't look like it replaces WinAmp. by rogoshen1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      foobar2000 (NFI) seems like a pretty solid replacement for winamp.. if you want a barebones player that doesn't do a bunch of nonsense like album art, social bullshit, or recommendations.

      just a simple, barebones mp3 player.

  2. Deceiving headline by DigitAl56K · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

  3. ES7, Electron, React, and MobX by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Jesus, do I really need a web browser and layers of JS frameworks to display an "unobtrusive" music player?

    1. Re: ES7, Electron, React, and MobX by mukinrestak · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Ha, I tried it just now and was wondering where the fuck the volume was. That is an unacceptable lack of an extremely basic feature. See, on a PC, I have different programs which may be producing noises at the same time. If I turn up the system volume it affects ALL those programs at once. That is not an acceptable method for changing the volume on a FUCKING MUSIC PLAYER. I shouldn't have to blast my ears into deafness from notification dings, bleeps, clangs, and plarbfts in order to turn up the volume on my music.

  4. Re:Streaming Services by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    None of my music is stored locally, anymore.

    Then it's not your music.

  5. Re:only real DUMB people use linux for linux's sak by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    So many retards on Slashdot these days. So many retards...

  6. Re:They broke literally their only requirement by nctritech · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Winamp is using 10.6 MB of RAM and 0.4% CPU on my machine right now as it plays a song. If PlexAmp can run in less than that, I'm happy to try it out. Oh, wait, that's right...everything today, no matter how simple the purpose, is made of a hundred massive bullshit frameworks and high-level inefficient glue code. Oh well.