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

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.

[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.)

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.

Plexamp

[ChoGGi]

Plexamp is 45MB
Winamp is 10MB

But fuck it I got Foobar2000 (4MB)

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.

Winamp and Plugins

[Dwedit]

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