Hi community folk. I’ve recently been trialling Plex / Plexamp and thought I’d offer a short appraisal of how it can bring an enhanced experience to those of us with local music libraries.
Plex can be added to Sonos as a service in the usual way. You can play your Plex music library through Sonos without paying for a Plex Pass subscription. This is basic functionality and offers an alternative way of playing your local files. It does require internet access as the files are being access through Plex’s servers, and your media server needs to be online. Some people do this to overcome the Sonos metadata constraint (typically referred to as the 65K track limit, even if that’s not 100% accurate).
Plex Media Server can be installed on all sorts of hardware and operating systems. I am using a HP ProDesk 400 G4 SFF PC. It uses too much power to be a long-term solution for 24x7 operation (it idles at around 50W), but perfect for testing. Mini PCs using Intel N100 processors seem to be flavour of the month for always-on, low power consumption (~10W).
You point Plex Media Server to your music collection, and it will build its own catalogue of your music including additional metadata. I tell Plex to use my local metadata (names, genres, cover art etc) in preference to those it can gather. Plex’s source of music metadata is MusicBrainz. Viewing your library through Plex presents a really clean view and provides additional artist and album info.
Plexamp is a separate music client, primarily targeting mobile devices, through which you can play your library tracks. It behaves like most music apps.
If you purchase Plex Pass (monthly, annual, or lifetime), you get access to some additional features for music analysis that I think really add value. The one I will focus on is Sonic Analysis.
While standard Plex will show you related artists and albums in your library in a standard way, Sonic Analysis generates additional relationships in the form of sonically-similar artists. Through Plexamp, you can generate Style and Mood stations which genuinely bring up some interesting mixes. I have found myself listening to music in my collection that I hadn’t heard in a long time.
Having created one of the stations you can save the tracks as a playlist which can be accessed through the regular Sonos Plex service. You cannot get to the Style and Mood stations through Sonos in the first instance (you have to use Plexamp), hence why I save them as playlists.
I have also exported Plex playlists using a third-party app called Tautulli. If I export individually in M3U format, I can then move them into my Sonos library location, refresh my index, and the playlists appear in the ‘Imported Playlists’ option through my music library. Using the Sonos desktop app, I can then create a Sonos Playlist from the imported playlist, and it shows in the usual playlist location.
Final piece of detail is that Sonic Analysis is unsupported on ARM processors (eg Raspberry Pi). The server on which you’re running Plex Media Server must be supported, but you could still host your music on a Pi (I’ve not tested it, but it’s only the Plex server that cannot be hosted on an ARM box). A lot of people run Plex Media Server on a NAS.
Hopefully someone finds this interesting. What sold me is Sonic Analysis, a great feature over and above standard Plex.
