Popular media player platform on Monday announced the launch of the Plexamp music player for and, one of the first projects to come out of Plex Labs, the company's experimental testing initiative. Plexamp takes inspiration from Winamp to create a nostalgia-filled media player that offers extensive functionality with a barebones UI.
Elan Feingold, CTO and Co-Founder at Plex, Plexamp was an attempt to combine music with Plex, and kept three things in mind 'small, powerful, beautiful.' Winamp became its inspiration, considered by the Plex team to be 'the most classic and beloved small audio player'. So while Winamp was mostly limited to Windows and playing local or networked files, Plex itself is a client/ server model that has a metadata rich library and gives you access to your personalised music collection anywhere in the world. Plex claims that the challenge to combine Plex and Winamp was with the aim to create a 'small' app. The Plexamp app on both macOS and Windows and works like a native app offering support for media keys (skipping tracks and play/ pause toggle) and notifications.
The Plexamp requires macOS 10.9 or above or Windows 7 or newer for download. The app will have support for all music formats. It has Companion support that offers remote control for other Plex players and can be remote controlled itself. The Plexamp also works in offline mode. Plex has made use of a combination of platforms including Electron, React, MobX, and ES7 to develop Plexamp.
Plex Launches Plexamp A Small Music Player For Macbook Pro
The media player will be based on Music Player Daemon (MPD), an open-source audio player. Besides support for standard media keys, it offers a global activation hotkey much like Spotlight on macOS (cmd+shift+space). This gives additional functionality to some power users. There are also features like Gapless Playback, soft transitions, album art key colour extracting, and a wide range of visualisers. Plex is also rolling out some features that will be part of its Plex Pass premium music package. In a limited period offer, Plexamp will offer these features for free for the next three months. These features include Loudness levelling for maintaining consistent playback volumes, smart transitions for seamless transitions between audio tracks, SoundPrints for assigning unique artwork to each album, and waveform seeking for tracking audio patterns in each track.
Plexamp will also have unique algorithms in place, for its Plex Pass users (free for three months), to ensure that the music shuffle is based on factors like track popularity, rating, and listening history. With Artist Radio, each artist will provide an artist radio station which gives users a way to browse similar music.
Plex App For Mac
Fresh out of Plex's new division is, the company's take on a dedicated music player. Built off the back of nostalgia for the days where Winamp reigned supreme, Plexamp offers up a slick, standalone experience for playing back your music. Whereas Plex's main offering is focused on playback your whole media collection, Plexamp sets its sights on playing back music and music alone. The miniature player works with both and macOS and supports native playback controls. There's support for playing nearly any music format you can think of, and Plexamp can even be used as a companion control for other Plex players you may have running.
On top of basic playback, Plexamp throws in a number of other niceties, like gapless playback and soft transitions. And for anyone pining for the days where Windows Media Player reigned supreme, Plexamp includes visualizers at which you can stare intensely while jamming out. Plexamp also sports some intelligent features like loudness leveling to normalize playback volume, as well as different types of library stations to create radio stations out of your tracks. If you have a large local library of music and haven't chained yourself to one of the streaming giants yet, Plexamp looks like it could be an interesting option to check out. That's particularly timely for anyone currently going through the who may be on the lookout for another player.
If you'd like to give Plexamp a try, you can download it now from the.