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.

Comments

But does it run (on) Linux?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

(Subject asks it all.)

Why replace it?

[ArchieBunker]

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.

Re:This doesn't look like it replaces WinAmp.

[Dutch Gun]

the goal was to build a small player

Failed out of the gate. Why is that?

along with a combination of ES7, Electron, React, and MobX technologies

Welp, this means that this music player is going to take up a hell of a lot more memory and CPU power than should conceivably be necessary for a simple music player. It's hilarious to me that this music player is probably going to eat up more RAM than an instance of Microsoft Word, which clocks in at a svelte 23MB on my computer with a reasonably substantial document loaded. Yes, I know they meant "small as in pixels", but a music player should also be small in size and complexity.

Is an embedded web browser the only cross-platform UI these types of projects seem capable of reaching for these days? Electron is mighty convenient if all you have are web programmers, but the user pays a very heavy price for that programmer convenience. I'm not usually one of those guys who moans about modern code bloat, but Electron apps just take it to a whole other level.

Winamp and Plugins

[Dwedit]

Winamp is really defined by its whole plugins ecosystem, if it doesn't emulate Winamp Plugins, it's not Winamp.

As a Lifetime Plex Pass member...

[slaker]

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.