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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.

17 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. Re:This doesn't look like it replaces WinAmp. by rudy_wayne · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    3. Re: This doesn't look like it replaces WinAmp. by niff · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:This doesn't look like it replaces WinAmp. by nctritech · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.)

    5. Re:This doesn't look like it replaces WinAmp. by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
  2. Why replace it? by ArchieBunker · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  3. 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?

  4. 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 Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

    2. 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.

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

    None of my music is stored locally, anymore.

    Then it's not your music.

  6. Plexamp by ChoGGi · · Score: 5, Informative

    Plexamp is 45MB
    Winamp is 10MB

    But fuck it I got Foobar2000 (4MB)

  7. 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.

  8. Winamp and Plugins by Dwedit · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

  9. As a Lifetime Plex Pass member... by slaker · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  10. I feel like I'm getting old. by Shemmie · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.