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.)

Re:But does it run (on) Linux?

[MightyYar]

In the comments on TFA:

Elan Feingold
Dec 19
Keep in touch; we have a Linux version running internally, but it’s not yet in a state to be shared.

This doesn't look like it replaces WinAmp.

[PsychoSlashDot]

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.

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

[rogoshen1]

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.

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

[rudy_wayne]

I still use WinAmp and it works perfectly fine. I decided to give this new PlexAmp a try but you can't even install the program without first creating an account and logging into their website. Sorry. Fuck you. Deleted.

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

[aix tom]

Heh. Before I read your post I thought those pictures in the article where adds for something completely different, and was going to complain that there wasn't a single screen-shots of that alleged new winamp-like player anywhere in the article. ;-)

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

[niff]

Every time somebody wants to "improve" winamp they add extra windows, useless art and make it slower to start.

Even the winamp guys themselves fell for that trap. I never used the media management stuff nor the modern skins.

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

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

Funny, I downloaded it just fine. The file name is "Plexamp Setup 1.0.0.exe"
I followed the link from the story, but then again I downloaded the Windows version, perhaps the mac is different, I didn't see a Linux version either...

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

[nctritech]

There's no need for a Winamp replacement. I'm running Winamp right now on Windows 7 and Windows 10. Newer displays with higher resolutions or old nerds losing their eyesight need "double size" turned on so the controls are easier to read but that's about it. The classic skins need to be used for maximum nostalgia and readability. Milkdrop2 and AVS come with Winamp 5.666 and I have zero complaints. It takes a while for it to sort a playlist with tens of thousands of songs but it's just as awesome as it was in 1999. Best of all, it's written the way a program should be: compact, easy to control, almost zero learning curve, no unnecessary internet phone home bullshit (especially since Winamp has changed hands and ceased development, even the installation stat reporter doesn't work when it does try to phone home to bump the install base stats.)

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.

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

[ezelkow1]

oh it definitely uses more ram. I installed it just to give it a run through

1) Requires a plex login just to open it after installation, fail on ubobstrusive
2) After login requires a plex audio server running just to see audio files, fail on the audio player part when it cant even browse a music collection by itself
3) Uses 160mb of ram just to display the 'Could not find audio server' window, fail on small

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

[darkain]

That's probably because foobar2000 is authored by a former Winamp developer. (I've been a foobar2000 user myself for at least 15 years now). It started because Peter wanted a better MP3 audio rendering pipeline that Winamp devs wouldn't provide, so he made his own. He only cared about audio quality, and it shows.

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

[ckatko]

I'm still using it. And no, foobar doesn't do it all or as well.

The one advantage of foobar was playing esoteric media files like SNES music files.

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

[hackertourist]

Winamp has several drawbacks:
1. it distorts the sound at high volumes (anything near 100%).
2. stupid, low-resolution fonts make everything hard to read.
3. its use of a non-standard window means screen management apps like UltraMon can't place its controls in Winamp's top bar.

I replaced winamp with VLC which solves all of these problems, and is infinitely more configurable to boot.

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

[Luckyo]

Don't run the current w/e social BS winamp. Run the older fully offline versions. They never need to be updated. They just work and they don't need to ever go to the internet.

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

[Luckyo]

Pretty sure there's a plug-in in winamp for almost every audio format in existence.

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

[hackertourist]

I've never caught VLC distorting audio. It depends a bit on the source material, if the source is quiet you can turn up the volume in VLC way past 100% without ill effects. A source that's recorded at near 0 dB has less headroom.
Point is, Winamp started distorting at much lower volumes than VLC.

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

[thegarbz]

Huh? Foobar doesn't do album art?

*stares at the album art visible in the foobar window*.

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

[TheRaven64]

It's a shame musicpd doesn't get more attention. It's been around for ages and there are a bunch of clients (Mac, Windows, *NIX, Android, though strangely not iOS, and some web-based ones). I have it installed on my media centre box and also on a RPi in another room (which accesses the same music library over NFS). I can control the music from pretty much any computer in my house.

The clients are generally written for each platform, so don't suffer from the bloat of something like Electron. You can run it locally too, and quit the UI entirely without stopping music playing.

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

[TheRaven64]

And, apparently, this abomination is really just a badly written musicpd client with integration with some remote cloudy crap. Slow news day?

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

[nctritech]

Winamp only distorts if you have the EQ cranked up and the audio is already loud and you don't lower the preamp but that's about it. Stupid low-resolution fonts? I guess you never turned on "double size" mode or used the CONFIGURABLE playlist font size.

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

[hackertourist]

as far as I remember (I ditched winamp a long time ago), "double size" mode just magnified the low-resolution art by 2x, so the interface looked like the screenshot here or see the comparison here. The text in that screenshot is barely legible.

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

[nctritech]

Yes, it literally doubles the size of the interface. I don't see a problem with readability there. What can't you read, and why can't you read it?

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

[dinfinity]

Foobar2000 is not barebones. It does follow function over form and is focused on audio playback and performance. It is fast, feature-rich, customizable, tweakable and extensible.

It's just not particularly noob-friendly when it comes to things like theming or 'syncing your iPod'. For a power user, however, it sits lonely at the top of the desktop audio player-heap. IMHO.

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

[hackertourist]

My eyesight is fine. Yet e.g. the word "stereo" is a green blob at first glance, thanks to the unneccessary 5x7 pixel bitmap used and the noise around the letters. Same goes for the track name. The W in 'Llama whip' is antialiased into '||||'. All of the text in the interface takes more trouble/time to decipher than it should: reading should be effortless. If I wanted low-resolution graphics, I'd work on a ZX Spectrum.

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

[demonlapin]

Yeah, I remember having a player that would actually play MP3's on a 486 running DOS, and it even had a decent little visualization thing in it. It doesn't take an enormous amount of computing resources to play music.

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

[rogoshen1]

heh, so it does. it's just one of the first things i turned off -- set and forget it would seem.

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

[DarkRookie]

Doesnt support local playback. Or at least if nothing is the Music folder, it will refuse to work and you cannot select your library.

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

[marten3109]

Cubic Player or Open Cubic Player perhaps? I just remember it played Mp3 as well as XM (Fast Tracker 2) files.

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

[demonlapin]

MPXPLAY was the software. Encoding was a much bigger pain back then, and storage hadn't gotten ridiculously cheap yet - I think my HDD was 5 GB or so at the time. CD recorders were just starting to fall in price. Late 1997.

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

[nctritech]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

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

[hackertourist]

I pity the company that employs you if that's how you react to customer feedback.
Double-size mode may be large text, it's significantly less readable than the Verdana 10pt at 75% zoom factor I have no trouble reading from 75 cm away.

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

[toddestan]

The problem with VLC is its playlist functionality is a complete joke compared to Winamp.

Winamp shouldn't be distorting the audio if you have it configured correctly. I don't even use the EQ. VLC will distort the shit out the audio if you go past 100% as it is.

The other complaints mostly have to do with a UI that was made to be cool by 1997 standards. It still manages to outdo many 2017 UI efforts though.

Electron?

[mrwugga]

Great another app that eats half a gig of ram

only uses 1000000 more resources than foobar

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Why write code when you can arrange toolkits?

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

The app comprises multiple Electron processes, a player server process (for being remotely controlled), and the MPD player process, while managing to present a semblance of a whole.

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!

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: Why replace it?

[Anonymous Coward]

For flac's sake.

With memory what it is these days, no-one need bother with lossy mp3s.

There's no reason to suffer from Apple's 2002 format du jour decision any more.

Re: Why replace it?

[ArchieBunker]

Better than 90% of the population can't tell CD audio from 320kbps mp3.

Re: Why replace it?

[spire3661]

If you are going to use have enough storage for FLAC why bother encoding at all, just store the raw .wavs off the disc.

Re: Why replace it?

[DontBeAMoran]

There's no such thing as "raw .wavs off the disc". Red Book discs don't have computer files, much less Windows audio files.

Re: Why replace it?

[NicknameUnavailable]

With memory what it is these days, no-one need bother with lossy mp3s.

This to be honest. I haven't listened to music in years, no paying streaming companies, letting the government know my tastes in music, OR paying the liberal extremists in Hollywood a dime. Just remember the songs the first time you hear them and there's no loss.

Re: Why replace it?

[Per Wigren]

FLACs are about half the size of WAVs, but more importantly they have a standardized metadata format so you get proper artist/album/title/etc tags.

Re: Why replace it?

[thegarbz]

I would wager that this number is closer to 100%

Re: Why replace it?

[TheRaven64]

You have three choices:

The first is to use lossy compression. This trades space for both audio quality and processing overhead.

The second is to use lossless compression. This trades space for processing overhead.

The third is to use no compression. This uses more space, but has no quality or processing overhead.

Given the sizes of modern disks, the last one seems like a good option, except that it's never quite that clear cut. The CPU overhead of decoding something like FLAC is pretty much negligible these days: even on a mobile device, the difference in power consumption between decoding FLAC and an idle but powered core is likely to be difficult to measure. However, the cost of pulling data from disk / flash and storing it in the buffer cache is a little bit less trivial. If you can keep the data compressed on disk, you use less power to move it to RAM. Even better, you're typically DMAing from cache these days, so you also use less power to move the data from RAM to cache, decode a block, and then DMA only the decoded data.

TL;DR: There is basically no disadvantage in using lossless compression unless it is very computationally expensive on modern systems, and there are several advantages.

Re: Why replace it?

[DontBeAMoran]

Yeah, why FLAC? Use Apple Lossless!

Deceiving headline

[DigitAl56K]

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?

Re:Deceiving headline

[Luckyo]

To give this useless piece of crap of a player some marketing using a known brand that is still in heavy use?

ES7, Electron, React, and MobX

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re: ES7, Electron, React, and MobX

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet, it comes with no Volume Control. From the FAQ:

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.

Re: ES7, Electron, React, and MobX

[mukinrestak]

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.

Re: ES7, Electron, React, and MobX

[Luckyo]

Windows does in fact offer per application volume settings. They're behind a few clicks though. Nothing like just scrolling your mouse wheel in winamp.

Re: ES7, Electron, React, and MobX

[Lord Crc]

Well you could always use the system mixer, at least on Windows, though I admit that's a bit of a hassle if your music is very varied.

Requires a Plex Server...

[galvanash]

...definitely not a WinAmp replacement.

Re:Linux support?

[Anaerin]

Here you go: https://github.com/RasPlex/Ope... Pre-compiled packages for Debian Jessie (x86 & x64), Ubuntu Trusty (x64), Ubuntu Xenial (x86 & x64) and Ubuntu Yakkety (x86 & x64), along with RasPlex for Raspberry Pi v1 and v2, embedded builds for several architectures, and installers for Windows and MacOS.

Re:Streaming Services

[Anonymous Coward]

None of my music is stored locally, anymore.

Then it's not your music.

Re:only real DUMB people use linux for linux's sak

[tepples]

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.

They broke literally their only requirement

[tepples]

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.

Re:They broke literally their only requirement

[nctritech]

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.

Re:They broke literally their only requirement

[nctritech]

Oh hey, found what I was actually looking for to show the bloat of modern "apps."

LUDDITES.

Re:They broke literally their only requirement

[ezelkow1]

Well they aren't even close. Figured Id give it a shot just to laugh. So first of all it requires a plex login just to use. After a login it also then requires a plex audio server running to server music, completely ignoring the entire idea behind 'audio player'. Finally just sitting there at the tiny 'could not find audio server' window it uses 160mb ram

Fail on every front

Re:They broke literally their only requirement

[thegarbz]

Winamp is using 10.6 MB of RAM and 0.4% CPU on my machine right now

LOL, saving RAM in this day and age? The cold war is over man. Get yourself 32GB for Christmas and never look at your RAM consumption again.

Re:They broke literally their only requirement

[Voyager529]

LOL, saving RAM in this day and age? The cold war is over man. Get yourself 32GB for Christmas and never look at your RAM consumption again.

My sarcasm meter reads 50/50, so if this was intended as sarcasm, I half-got it.

If it isn't, then I will state that I disagree. Even if machines have 32GB of RAM, it should be used for things other than 'to accommodate inefficient code'. Sure, we're not trying to make every byte count, but elsewhere on the thread someone posted some information regarding how the iOS Facebook app is at least twice as large as it needs to be primarily because of the redundant copies of libraries, which could be linked. The use of more RAM means longer load times because all the data going into RAM needs to come from somewhere, and assuming end users are running high end SSDs with gigabit internet is going to be false far more than it is going to be true.

Efficient code takes longer to write, but from an end user standpoint, there are no downsides to more efficient code.

Re:They broke literally their only requirement

[thegarbz]

it should be used for things other than 'to accommodate inefficient code'

It wasn't sarcasm. The problem is the vast majority of what people whinge about "inefficient code" isn't actually so, but rather code that simply provides more functionality, different visualisations etc.

Call it bloat if you will, if all you're after is a simple music player, but the reality is not even remotely as inefficient as you think, and with the cost of processing and RAM available to us there's no real requirement to count every cycle and optimise every instruction at the expense of the above.

Re:They broke literally their only requirement

[DontBeAMoran]

You may have 32GB RAM. You may be able to upgrade to 32GB RAM.

Most people only have between 2GB and 8GB RAM and cannot even upgrade it (either it's the maximum allowed by the CPU/chipset/motherboard or it's soldered directly on the motherboard).

Re:They broke literally their only requirement

[nctritech]

It WASN'T sarcasm? Ohhhhh, that's not good.

Winamp has visualizations, a library system, an equalizer, internet streaming and inter stream server capabilities, CD ripping, player device management, and a set of plugin frameworks. While playng music largely with default settings, it uses 10MB RAM. This PlexAmp thing uses well over 10 times that RAM and practically sits on top of a web browser core...while doing absolutely nothing at all. Oh, and it ultimately has less features than Winamp and is harder to use.

Computer RAM being commonly measured in gigabytes today does not justify the software framework bloat explosion. Every program in existence today seems to run on top of a fat core of frameworks that contain a lot of unnecessary cruft; in the case of PlexAmp, we can see that the inefficiency is an entire order of magnitude and then some. Start multiplying that by the number of programs on a computer. What good is Moore's Law when software is a gas that expands to fit its container? It has to stop somewhere.

"the reality is not even remotely as inefficient as you think" - I've provided you with Winamp's operating stats. Prove that PlexAmp "is not even as remotely inefficient as I think." Show me where PlexAmp uses 10MB of RAM. Show me where it uses 0.5% of an i7-6700HQ while playing an MP3 file. Hand-waving away concerns proves nothing; what are your numbers? The numbers mentioned elsewhere in this thread indicate that the inefficiency relative to Winamp is freaking insane, but you are certainly free to prove otherwise.

Re:They broke literally their only requirement

[thegarbz]

Those most people who have 2GB of RAM aren't the multitaskers who are going to give a damn if a single app uses more than 10MB.

Re:They broke literally their only requirement

[thegarbz]

That's cute. Most other media players have all that and more. Also claiming Winamp has visualizations is like saying that a 1970 Fiat 300 is a car. Yes, by definition it is. That doesn't mean there aren't far nicer ones around.

To be clear I don't use Winamp because it is inferior to many other options. While I don't know much about Plexamp including its memory use, there's a reason Winamp fell out of favour with many and that has nothing to do with it stopping doing what it was already capable of.

Rather:
1) People needed more. or
2) People were happy with anything, i.e. they didn't give a crap about the resource usage you hold so dear.

Re:They broke literally their only requirement

[nctritech]

When you say "most other media players," what specific media players are you talking about? You've mentioned "other options" twice and the claims made are baseless without specific examples of those other options.

As far as I can tell, the reasons Winamp fell out of favor are gross mismanagement by AOL, the user base aging and younger people not even knowing it existed, streaming services like Spotify and Pandora making it less important to a large chunk of the general population to have music files on their own machines, walled gardens like iTunes (default audio player box checked at install time!) and the iTunes Store making it more difficult to use Winamp, and the proliferation of smartphones as primary playback devices for lots of people due to simple convenience. Winamp had a pretty good Android app but they were way too late in releasing it to have an impact and it pretty much died when the entire Winamp project was shut down.

Just because people make alternatives to Winamp doesn't mean that they "need more." I'll give you the "don't give a crap" one because people actually still use iTunes for playback and it's a really yucky music player these days that exists more to funnel people into buying things than enjoying what they bought.

Re:They broke literally their only requirement

[thegarbz]

What other commonly used ones do you want?

Let's start with the top two for bloat:
iTunes: Far better library management, linked to online store, plays video, support for Airplay and remote navigation of libraries, underlying framework to integrate with browsers.
Windows Media Player: Huge underlying framework to integrate with the entire OS, video support, network streaming support.

Or pick something open source?
VNC: You're on Slashdot you should know the capabilities of this one.

Maybe something more nerdy that a lot of geeks use?
Foobar: Remote control, web server, proper output management, better customisability, better automation of music tagging, more file format support.

But in any case I can see you agree with my points. Since you agree that people seem to be happy using iTunes I will quote my original reply to you:

LOL, saving RAM in this day and age?

Re:They broke literally their only requirement

[nctritech]

Playing video isn't the job of an audio player, but Winamp DOES play video if you want it to and has done so for a very long time. An AirPlay plugin exists for Winamp. "Underlying frameworks" by itself is not any sort of selling point. What good are the "underlying frameworks?" Winamp has had network streaming support built-in since the 90s. VNC is not a media player, it's a remote desktop program, but I'm guessing you meant VLC. I don't use VLC because I don't like the interface, so if you'd care to elaborate on what VLC has for audio playback related purposes (don't care about video features, no one needs video playback for music) that Winamp doesn't, I'm listening. foobar2000's interface is cluttered and ironically has way too much text padding at the same time, and where's the equalizer? What file formats does foobar2000 support that Winamp does not? A web interface plugin exists for Winamp.

No, I don't agree that people are happy using iTunes. iTunes is a piece of flaming crap, but if you have an iProduct your only realistic choice is to shove your library into iTunes, so you're stuck with it. Taking the path of least resistance does not make users "happy."

Feel free to buy me 32GB of RAM if you're offering. I won't turn that deal down.

Re:They broke literally their only requirement

[nctritech]

Playing music and running a browser and a word processor at the same time is a very common scenario. Ask any student in college doing a paper. Just because you have 2GB of RAM doesn't mean you can get away with running even a small number of bloated programs. My browser right now is using 2.5GB of RAM (lots of tabs, paused videos, uptime 8 days) which already exceeds 2GB, so with the browser already in paging territory excluding every other thing in the system INCLUDING the operating system and its required processes, 10MB vs. 160MB can be a significant amount of extra paging to disk. Note that the disk cache is also largely evicted once memory pressure is that high. By the way, you don't even want to know how much RAM Plex Media Server is using on my machine, and it's streaming nothing at all.

Re:They broke literally their only requirement

[thegarbz]

Playing music and running a browser and a word processor at the same time is a very common scenario.

And one that can easily be achieved with iTunes and Chrome having 50+ tabs open on 2GB of RAM.

Re:They broke literally their only requirement

[thegarbz]

No, I don't agree that people are happy using iTunes.

Cover your eyes, plug your ears and shout la la la la la. That is a really good argument.

Since Winamp is so much better and so easily available and was a market leader of the time, it should be king. But it isn't. Look you justify how you think people act all you want, but your comments aren't backed up at all by the reality that most people aren't using Winamp and are happily using what they want.

By the way your no-true-scottsman fallacy was noted and ignored. But there's really no need to justify my point any further given the underlying Winamp market share.

You don't need 32GB of RAM to run even the most bloated piece of shit. iTunes runs fine on the most garbage of hardware even when multitasking.

Re:They broke literally their only requirement

[nctritech]

iTunes sucks: A GIF guide to why Apple’s desktop music app must be fixed

Why does iTunes suck so incredibly much?

iTunes sucks, we all know it. What are my options for music player (nonstreaming) on the iPhone 6s?

Why I Hate iTunes: Syncing Sucks And So Does Selecting Music

Can iTunes suck anymore than it already does?

iTunes Really Is That Bad

Apple’s iTunes Is Alienating Its Most Music-Obsessed Users

Eleven Reasons Why iTunes Sucks

Why does Itunes SUCK SO MUCH ???

Again: no, people are not happy using iTunes. People use iTunes because Apple requires it for their expensive iDevices. They hate it, but they want to sync music to their iPhones.

You're saying that my assertion about video players is a "no true Scotsman" fallacy? That's a laugh. You just didn't want to dig your hole deeper by responding to what I said. Video players are not designed to deal with large music libraries, nor should they be. A sports car can be used to take lots of cleaning supplies between cleaning jobs, but a utility van will be far better suited to the task. Your choice of VLC to support this notion is especially hilarious. The VLC media library is like only using the Winamp playlist for your entire music collection.

Or perhaps you meant that foobar2000 is not the true Scotsman. In that case, you missed my arguments about the interface being poorly designed.

Now here's a real laugh for you regarding your sneering at Winamp market share. While I don't have stats from anywhere today, Lifehacker did a survey in 2013 to find out what the readers thought was the best desktop music player and in the end Winamp was the winner. So at least in 2013, 16 years after Winamp was released, it was still the preferred player for everyone that read Lifehacker at the time. Unfortunately, most articles seem to omit or only "honorably mention" Winamp based on it no longer being developed which at this point is really only a problem for people who want double size mode to look better or want to sync a modern iPod with Winamp (yes, Winamp used to sync iPods.)

I'm sure iTunes can play music back on garbage hardware while multitasking. Maintaining a 44.1 kHz 16-bit stereo audio stream while multitasking was easily done by Winamp in 1997 on an original Pentium, so why wouldn't it be possible to do the same thing today on a bargan-basement Celeron that's slow for browsing but still two orders of magnitude faster than an original Pentium? It's not hard to have a realtime-priority and heavily optimized thread that does nothing but decompress music file data and pass it to the sound system. Good luck switching between iTunes and other stuff in 2GB of RAM while trying to do some actual work.

One more thing was never addressed. You never elaborated on why "underlying frameworks" is some sort of selling point. Last I checked, no one went out looking for media players and said "I want one that has underlying frameworks."

Plexamp

[ChoGGi]

Plexamp is 45MB
Winamp is 10MB

But fuck it I got Foobar2000 (4MB)

Re:Plexamp

[Duckeenie]

Reading you tea leaves right now and the first thing I see is that you're under 25. You'll get the rest when I receive the cheque.

Re:Plexamp

[moronikos]

You should try drinking coffee and keep your day job. You're not even close.

Re:Plexamp

[DarkRookie]

Spinning is still much cheaper for anything pass 256GB. My Steam library is over 1TB, not including what Blizzard is adding for D3 and D2

Winamp and Plugins

[Dwedit]

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

Re: only real DUMB people use linux for linux's sa

[guruevi]

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.

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.

Re:As a Lifetime Plex Pass member...

[slaker]

It transcodes well for non-LAN playback, too. I tested it against a 32-thread Xeon and that one machine was able to hold up against a 11 (literally as many devices as I could easily borrow) 1.5Mbit streams on phones and mobile devices over LTE connections.

And the consistent interface across (most) platforms is a nice plus as well.

I generally like Kodi better for media presentation, but telling my brother in Prague to VPN in to my LAN so he can connect to my file server for his video needs is a complete non-starter.

Re:only real DUMB people use linux for linux's sak

[tepples]

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.

Re:Streaming Services

[snookiex]

That's the point, genius. Some of us don't care about your fancy streaming services. We just want a simple, low-memory-footprint mp3 player. This one doesn't seem to be that kind of player, though. I'll stick to Audacious for now.

Plugins

[HalAtWork]

Does it have plugins for all the various game music sound formats such as NSF, GYM, SPC, etc?

Couldn't find a volume control

[t0qer]

I like to fine tune the volume of my music when playing games. No such slider on this. Keep trying though plex team.

Fanboy so hard right now

[cyberman27]

Winamp, I love you, Plex I love you Winamp + Plex = omg this is amazing

FIre and Forget

[holophrastic]

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.
 

Re:FIre and Forget

[Luckyo]

You're forgetting the most important problem of all. How to make money off you.

Re:FIre and Forget

[holophrastic]

Oh, that's an easy one. We call that. . .yo' problem.

Re:only real DUMB people use linux for linux's sak

[spire3661]

You do realize that pretty much every computer on the planet that isnt Windows is a UNIX variant, right?

ANY music format?

[fox171171]

The player can also handle any music format,

Really? How about sheet music? Player piano punch cards?

Re:ANY music format?

[DontBeAMoran]

How about arcade music files? Or SNES? GameBoy?
What about MOD, S3M and XM?

I feel like I'm getting old.

[Shemmie]

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.

Re:I feel like I'm getting old.

[Mouldy]

I downloaded and install it too to see what the fuss is all about and I agree with everything you said.

Additionally, I will add that plexamp bears no resemblance to winamp. winamp's strengths were;
- Simple to use. Plexamp requires sign-in to a plex server, the volume cannot be controlled independently of the system (so good luck balancing music while playing a video game), there doesn't seem to be a way to manage playlists, browsing the library has been replaced with a search
- Small footprint. Plexamp is using 121.8MB of RAM on my Mac and that seems to be creeping up, around 16% CPU & it's 'energy impact' is around 21 (whatever that means). I don't know if that's good or bad in relation to winamp - but it is in addition to the plex server I've got running on my network - so I wouldn't say the overall plex ecosystem has a small footprint at all.
- Plays everything. In fairness, plex has always been ok with every format in my library - so maybe they nailed this one


Summary: It's ok but really nothing special and I feel like if you're paying homage to something like winamp, you need to do a very good job. It's like when you see someone redoing Led Zep - they have to do a really good job to be 'allowed' to do that.

Re:I feel like I'm getting old.

[coofercat]

That's incredible - somewhere in that program there's some code, that someone spent time writing, that specifically prevents the window moving until some other part of the program says it's okay. Methinks someone spent some time on some redundant code there :-(

I'm reminded of a UI story several years ago which headlined something like "Don't grey out menu items". The thinking there was similar - stop taking the time to write code to selectively enable and disable certain menu items. Instead, just design the thing to work right all of the time.

I'm still wondering what thinking lead to "let's stop the window moving until they've started playing something". I'd love to hear the justification - it's sort of like the answer to a riddle that you just can't figure out.

Privacy?

[casperghst42]

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.

Re:only real DUMB people use linux for linux's sak

[Rockoon]

Linux is not a unix....

BSD is a unix.

Re:only real DUMB people use linux for linux's sak

[bingoUV]

About your signature / journal entry : are you saying it is possible that there may be no risk with being tracked by ad networks ?

I use QMMP with OG Winamp skin

[mooterSkooter]

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!

Hard pass from me given issues with Plex

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

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.

Total FLAC support?

[valnar]

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.

Re:only real DUMB people use linux for linux's sak

[tepples]

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.

I use WinAmp at least weekly

[neo-mkrey]

and it still kicks the llama's ass.

QMMP

[alvieboy]

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/

Re:only real DUMB people use linux for linux's sak

[aitikin]

Linux is not a unix.... BSD is a unix.

But, the grandparent's statement still stands true, Linux is a UNIX variant.

If you go through a lot of hammers each month ...

[handy_vandal]

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

Re:Streaming Services

[ConceptJunkie]

I have all my music uploaded to the Amazon cloud, for which I pay $25/year. This gives me access to all of my music everywhere, without the need for hundreds of GB of storage, but I still keep offline copies of everything. Don't knock the cloud. It has its uses.

Nope

[DarkRookie]

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.

Holy fuck

[DarkRookie]

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.

Re:Does it spy on you?

[DarkRookie]

What improvements? I haven't seen any.

Re:Streaming Services

[DarkRookie]

Pretty annoying people is the cloud seems to be for and for $25 you could get a 32GB flashdrive for a backup if you really wanted to. That will definity last longer than a year. Plus you never know when Amazon will go fuck you we are deleting your music

Hmmm

[Shogun37]

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?

Re:Streaming Services

[DarkRookie]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

https://techcrunch.com/2017/12...
There goes your streaming. Local FTW.

Re: Streaming Services

[ConceptJunkie]

And I can access it on any device I have. You seem to be missing that part. It's convenience that's worth $2/month for me. Or are you suggesting I can access a shared folder on my computer from my phone or tablet from anywhere? Because that would be pretty neat. I don't need to set up a Plex server, or whatever.

See, I don't get you young people who can't see two inches in front of your noses. I never get over the capacity for people on the Internet to randomly insult folks for no good reason and taking the Lord's name in vain to boot. Yeah, I'll keep my low ID, thanks. You have nothing to offer the conversation.

Re:Streaming Services

[ConceptJunkie]

Well, let's see. I would need about eight 32GB flashdrives, and I can't access those from every device I use without a whole lot of hassle. So, yeah, this service and its convenience is worth $2/month for me, because I have a good job and can afford it. Perhaps you should spend more time writing sentences that actually make sense and less time making bogus recommendations.

Re: Streaming Services

[DarkRookie]

1. Fuck god. It has a lot to answer for and it is staying quiet.
2. Your service is shutting down. https://techcrunch.com/2017/12...
This is why the cloud is a bad idea. A company can just decide to stop the service. You're lucky you get a year to download everything.
Then get a 256GB for $60. Or use SyncThing.