#plexamp

[leveragehunters]

I have ditched Spotify. I know, I know, it's not an airport etc etc. But I had some thoughts.

A big part of making the decision was the 20+ years of MP3 files sitting disorganised and abandoned on various hard drives and old devices. I spent this past week or so organising them all onto one hard drive, updating file names and tags and folder structures so I could load them all into Plex.

I have a lot of music. Most of it ripped from CDs, some bought as MP3s, and some recorded from cassette tapes using an audio jack and a dream. There's bands I haven't thought about in years; ones that, once reminded, I missed terribly.

It made me realise in the 6 or so years I've had Spotify I've listened to less and less music overall and certainly to fewer once-beloved bands/albums. (I didn't even realise Linkin Park had a new album with a new co-lead singer, a woman, who is incredible.)

Now my music is all set up in Plex, I'm listening to it through PlexAmp, a fantastic music app I'm running on an old tablet, bluetoothed to some decent speakers instead of the crappy computer ones.

Result? I've maybe listened to more music this past week than in all of 2024.

Now there's obviously a novelty factor at play, having everything easily available for the first time in so long, but I think there's something else going on.

Algorithmically, Spotify fed me music. I had a few playlists, a few bands saved, but I didn't have a collection of my music. I'll be the first to admit I'm not a huge music buff, so without my music in front of me, without being able to flip through my personal musical history, the music I'd curated, it was just kind of lost. Listening to Spotify was more like walking through a record store or listening to the radio. I forgot about what I enjoyed and just listened to what was convenient.

Having all my music at my fingertips is making me happy. Happy listening and happy looking through my collection and happy remembering that yeah, that is an awesome album! It makes my brain feel good and I remember when I first heard it, who I was with, what was happening in my life!

It's awesome.

[puppyponydragon]

Actually in general does anyone have any recommendations for a way to download and listen to my own music of my choice, I hate Spotify and YouTube so much and I’m sick of ads ;-;

[intertexts]

i <3 numbers. modest mouse and fallout boy what is this 2015?

[intertexts-moving]

recent listening btw

[2percentsugar]

g-d a horrible fucking confluence of events just occurred

kitten knocks food onto laptop

tries to clean laptop keys

somehow presses the one that starts "Job of the Marching Job Corps" at full volume in spite of the fact that it's not the song plexamp had open

[saphushia]

Finally working on getting away from using spotify (been meaning to for ages but sunk cost fallacy knowing id have to remake my massive library) and so far I'm really happy using a mix of mediamonkey to organize my downloaded files n listen on pc, and plex/plexamp to stream them to my phone!

Going to take a while to build my library back up w/ having to download it all from scratch, but it gives me some busy work to chug along with and i have a big external drive to store them on so I don't have to worry abt running out of space lol

And I can finally add all the music not on spotify to my regular listening! I always hated I couldn't add local files to my favorites!

Only downsides are I have to have my computer on and awake to listen on my phone (just have to remember to turn it on before work), it takes slightly more effort to share music with friends (an extra few clicks finding the song somewhere else to grab a link), and I'll have to manually update my playlists to keep them synced between plex and MM. But that's all a fair tradeoff to me in exchange for not being beholden to the fuckery of spotify anymore (and not having to give them stupid amounts of money)

So tldr if your music desires are similar to mine (listen to ALL my music on my phone without having to explode my phone storage, share my music library between phone and comp, be able to listen to wierd niche songs not available on major platforms), and you have a computer you can leave on regularly, MM and plex seem to be solid! As a bonus they're both doing everything I want rn on the free versions, but plex is only $5/mo and MM is a one time payment that's $40-ish if I remember right. Which is sooooo much more reasonable imo

[ozy-short-for-ozone-layer]

A short analysis of alternatives to Spotify that involve piracy:

Spotube: very slow but does everything. Best for people who don't like change and like Spotify... But with the downside of sometimes playing the wrong song (which is definitely change,,, so maybe not). About 40% of the time you can change it to the right song, but there is the unfortunate 60% which is frustrating.

Rimusic: the most customizable app I've ever seen. In my opinion the best one, but often times will break due to YouTube updates and you have to wait a few weeks+ for the dev to fix it, though there is often a "unstable" version that you can update to on github that fixes it immediately, but is more likely to cause other issues.

Innertune: pretty decent. Used it for a few seconds once. Seems less buggy than rimusic but has similar issues with YouTube updates. Unsure if there are temp fixes with "unstable" updates for innertune, though.

Youtify: Is a pretty solid option but with the downside of no way to download music for offline use. If that isn't an issue, I'd recommend this secondary to rimusic simply because I've used it less and don't know how buggy etc it is.

Phocid: great player but you need to download songs using an alternative method which can be hard. Theoretically works well with another music piracy app that you use to download songs, and then use this app to listen to them for a less buggy experience and such.

If you want other apps like Phocid, there's Musicolet, Black Player, & Plexamp. I haven't used them enough to know how good they are though

Like & reblog this so when people want to do piracy they know they have options

[testure-1988]

Throbbing Gristle plexamp radio is serving fire 🔥

[m0thb1tch]

Self-hosting nerds: is there anything like Lidarr that incorporates SoulSeek? Is that even possible right now? I love the idea of automating my music downloads in a similar way to how I have with movies and TV, but nothing compares to SoulSeek. Current flow is torrents or SoulSeek -> beets to organize -> Plex server -> stream via PlexAmp

[puppyponydragon]

I wanted to try out plexamp and was wondering if anyone else recommend it for downloading and listening to music?

[intertexts-moving]

also remind me later i need 2 setup plexamp & transfer all my winamp music 2 that so i can download it on my phone.. -_-

[ivreblogathon]

Oh boy an excuse to mention my current obsessions: Bandcamp and Plex (and Plexamp)!

since spotify wrapped is coming today i just want to bring awareness to the fact that around 86% of the songs on spotify are currently demonetized since spotify decided that tracks with under 1,000 cannot be monetized. not only that the ceo of spotify cashed out $35.8 million dollars in spotify shares in the third quarter of the year and it has been reported that he earns more than the top artists on the platform.

for a platform that claims to support artists, this is outrageous and i hope people realize that an artist who is starting out, cannot make a living out of spotify streams simply because daniel ek and his friends made it worse for the artists trying to start a career. if you wanna support musicians and the possibility for them to get a living wage please follow United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) which are trying to make The Living Wage for Musicians Act a reality so musicians can be paid fairly through streaming platforms and get the cut they deserve.

[testure-1988]

The best feature of plexamp is the ability to make custom radios based on an artist mix

So I can mix Godflesh, Skinny Puppy, Throbbing Gristle and SPK..and I'll get those artists along with Industrial Metal, Electro, EBM and experimental first wave industrial. It's great.

[cinchel]

getting back into linux with a fun raspberryPi setup

while i dont really consider myself an "audiophile" i am picky and want to hear my music library as lossless as possible. my music collection (4.4TB as of this writing) is not all FLAC/lossless but a lot of my favorites i have made sure to have in the highest resolution i can. while most of them are 44.1k/24 i have some at 48/24 and 96/24. these are all served up via a plex server and for a number of years played on my stereo via Sonos Port which is a fine piece of hardware but has some limitations. it works well with the plex server but the interface to search and play music to it is slow and doesnt have all the features that any of the other plex players have (shuffle by album, "artist radio", etc.) also, to plex server the sonos device looks like its outside the network which is annoying.

the sonos port, even via digital coax, maxes out at 44.1/24 and while it says you can send it 48/24 i noticed the plex would downsample it to a lossy AAC stream anyway. trying to figure out how to edit the plex transcoding rules was not easy. that coupled with my annoyance with the interface, it finally pushed me to find a new way to do things.

i've always wanted to play with a raspberryPi but never had a good use case until now. i purchased this Raspberry Pi 5/8GB with the fan case, power supply, 32GB sdCard, and hdmi cable. with shipping it was $145.68

i recently discovered this shop from a friend on blusky, HiFi.me. they make all kinds of USB audio dongles. i recently picked up this Ut-23 which does USB to Optical SPDIF out and i luckily have a optical IN available on my receiver. $40 after shipping.

if i had know then what i read up on the last few weeks i would have maybe not gotten the fan case above and instead gotten this case which has room and knockouts for this pi-hat DIGI 2 pro. giving me the optical SPDIF i wanted. but its a wash in price so no real loss.

my original plan for the raspberryPi was actually for it to be a plex server too which is why i picked up the pi5 with 8GB of ram. but the ARM processor on the pi isnt compatible with the 'sonic analysis' option that plex. so i could have saved some money and gotten a pi4 with 2gb RAM and it would have worked just as well and saved me ~$40.

once i got the pi and setup the initial install i just followed this blog post to install plex amp but i made sure to use the most recent .pkg from here (which at this time of post is 4.11.5)

other tips i noticed at the install: use

sudo raspi-config

to make sure you set the USB audio as the default audio. it helps but i still had to go and set it as the audio output in the plexamp ui and reboot for it to always be the default when i play from plexamp.

why not use the HDMI out on the pi? i mean you bought the cable.

well i couldnt get plexamp to be able to send out audio out on it all. i did some very brief reading and it may have something to do with it being co-opted by the GUI on load. i tried a few things i read but none worked for me. and since i'm just using this for like 99% stereo audio files the limitations of optical SPDIF are not going to affect me.

hope this we helpful