31
votes
Plexamp is now available for free
Link information
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- Title
- Plex's Winamp-inspired music player Plexamp is now free | TechCrunch
- Authors
- Sarah Perez
- Published
- Jul 18 2023
- Word count
- 428 words
I've seen Plexamp recommended a lot here and I personally use it as well, so thought I would share that it is now free. However, there are some limitations - Sonic Sage (ChatGPT plugin that matches similar sounding songs in your library for playlists) is still a paid feature as well as downloads and some auto-generated mixes. I have a lifetime PlexPass but hopefully those who don't like to spend any extra money on self-hosting will find this beneficial.
I use Plex for my movie/TV/anime libraries, but I still use Spotify for music, even though I have an extensive music library that I collected from the days before I switched over to Spotify. (ty based what.cd)
I had tried using Plex for music (prior to the Plexamp days), but I was turned off by the fact that I had to buy a Plex Pass in order to download my music for offline listening. (Since my data plan is 250MB/month -- 10CAD/month plan on Public Mobile! -- offline listening is mandatory for me, sadly.)
Seems I'm still out of luck!
Though, I wonder if it might be worth it to one day shift back into curating my own music library again... it might be nice to get into the "album focused mindset" again, rather than the "playlist focused mindset" that Spotify encourages. If the Plexamp experience is nice enough, maybe it'd be worth it to make the switch!
I pay £9.99 / month for Spotify, and have had it for more than 10 years.
I started using Plex about 2 years ago and after a year decided to buy a lifetime plex pass for ~£100, then canceled one of my 2 active streaming subscriptions. It paid for itself in under a year.
I think if you can get into curating your own music library again (I already have enough trouble dedicating the time to do it for movies and TV) then it will absolutely pay for itself in no time.
When I tried it you also couldn't download from Tidal for offline listening, so blended use was not a good experience either
Plexamp has come along way in the last few years, and I have transitioned back to listening to my own library more than relying on a subscription service. I always recommend people to get a Lifetime PlexPass, especially those special times of the year when they go on sale.
That’s awesome they’re making more parts of Plex available to those without the pass. I got a lifetime pass like ten years ago (hands down the best purchase I’ve ever made), but none of my users have/need one. Always nice to see they’ll be able to get a little more use out of it without having to pay.
I'm really happy about this and looking forward to giving it a go. For a while I've been interested in trying out Plexamp but I always got turned off at having to have a Plex Pass for it, not because I didn't want to pay for it necessarily but I was hoping to get a trial to figure out if it was the right solution for me. While I've read a lot of good comments about Plexamp, there seems to be a general disdain for what Plex in general has become. People complain about their set up being broken by new and unwanted features. It also never felt right to me that you needed an account to stream content locally within your network.
Edit: Just noticed this is an AMP link, @sparkle I suggest you learn about AMP links and consider linking directly to HTML sources instead in the future. Here's some info: https://www.amputatorbot.com/
Shoot you're right, I have a DNS filter for amp at the beginning, but that's the first time I've consciously seen amp at the end of the link, it totally slipped by me. I set that filter years ago and never thought about things changing. Now I wonder how many other ones I've missed... Thanks for the catch and warning! Don't think I can edit the link though :(
As for Plex, yeah it's seemed to be a bit of a controversial subject and I can't say I blame people, there are lots of valid reasons to dislike it. For me personally, it does what I need it to do and I accept the risks and try not to complain too much since I willingly chose it.
I suppose if one really didn't want to have an account, you could create an account, setup the server, then block all the Plex sites via iptables or however you want. They provide a dynamic file with their AWS IPs that can be blocked. You should still be able to use non-plex media scrapers. I'm not sure if it requires you to periodically sign back in though if there's no contact for awhile. But if not, you could just delete the account and then run everything locally. You could even put in a local A record for plex.tv to your local plex IP lol
Edited it for you.
Thank you very much, you're a god amongst us with all the work you do behind the scenes!
I agree that it's better to link to the source (canonical) page, but that isn't a very good source for learning about Amp. Most of what they write on their frontpage is outdated, misleading, or simply wrong.
In particular, the comment about the carousel hasn't been valid for a couple years, and the hand-wavy comment about "questionable performance" is misinformation resulting from testing Amp without its cache component, which is where the performance gains actually come from.
Tildes doesn't provide an Amp Cache, so it doesn't derive any benefit from serving Amp links. The pages themselves could be smaller (and in fact the TechCrunch link above is a whopping 10x smaller than its canonical page), but that won't be universally true. It still seems more "correct" to serve the canonical link.
That's actually how the Share dialogue works on mobile devices; they will pull the canonical source to clean up the URL, and remove excess query strings and anchors. It could make sense for Tildes to do the same, and offer to swap in the canonical link when submitting.
So is it a media player for local content or can you use it with your server like plex and stream your music? Can it do both?
You use it with your own Plex server and you can also use it for streaming Tidal, which is a hi-fidelity streaming service. I don't think it can be used with local only content without using the server, I think it picks the source based on what's in your Plex account.
Thought I'd give it a shot as I use tidal currently for listening on Android, but I don't have my own Plex server right now and the app refuses to progress unless you have a "music library", which I assume requires talking directly to Plex server.
This is counter to their doco that suggests you can just use it for streaming from tidal, unfortunately.
E: Okay you have to link your account to your Plex account, documentation could do with some work here but it's clearly because they want you to sign up for tidal through Plex which I can't really blame them for.
https://plex.tv/users/other-services account can be linked here for anyone else trying this like me.
App works great now, only obvious annoyance I've found is it doesn't look like playlists can be sorted (I usually sort tracks by most recently added).
Plex amp is a fantastic app that really does everything you’d want in an app like it. I used to use it for a while but I just can’t get past how much easier it is to use Apple Music / Spotify. I had a fairly big music library, but the effort to curate it all is just too much considering for £10 a month you have streaming.
Is there a jellyfin version?
Definitely not as feature-rich as plexamp, but have you looked into Gelli for your needs yet?
I use iPhone so no