Plex launches Plexamp music player for Windows

Plex has introduced a new music app for Windows PCs. Inspired by the old Winamp, the app shows everything in a single window. Plex says that the app can support any music format imaginable. For those you don’t know, Plex is a client-server media player system and software suite comprising two main components. The Plex Media Server desktop application runs on Windows, macOS and Linux-compatibles including some types of NAS devices.

Head below to check out the list of features shared by the team.

• Runs on macOS and Windows, and works like a native app (e.g. media keys for skipping tracks and toggling play/pause are supported, as are notifications).
• Direct plays just about any music format you could dream of throwing at it.
• Companion support: can be used to remote control other Plex players and can be remote controlled itself.
• Works in offline scenarios (e.g. on an airplane with server running on laptop, or on your private submarine).

Diving in a bit deeper, let’s explore some of the sexier features which make Plexamp unique:

• Global activation hotkey: Besides support for standard media keys, it offers a global activation hotkey much like Spotlight on macOS (cmd+shift+space). This makes it quicker than ever to find something in your music library. There are a number of additional nice keybindings for power users.
• Gapless playback: As anyone who owns Pink Floyd’s The Wall or any of the approximately 1,534 live Dave Matthews concert albums will tell you, this is a very important feature for a music player.
• Soft transitions: We really wanted to sweat the little details with Plexamp. Whenever you pause a track, instead of abruptly stopping, we do a quick little fade out, and then fade in again when resuming (we also do this when seeking and skipping). Subtle difference, but a sweet one. Want to know just how obsessive we are? Those three little animated bars which show the currently playing track in the play queue? That’s actually a working spectrum analyzer.
• Visualizers: What would a music player be without a fun set of visualizations to enjoy while you listen to your music? The technical details here are pretty insanely cool (we perform FFT with psychoacoustic tuning in the MPD process, and then ship timestamped data over to the app process via UDP) and we have built hosts for Canvas API and WebGLvisualizers. Try ’em all and let us know your favorite!

• Album art key color extraction: We extract important colors from album artwork to use for various purposes (e.g. computing optimal opacity values for overlays, and providing a palette for the visualizers to use). Again, details matter.

Overall the music player looks good and kinda reminds me of Winamp but with better design and features. You can download Plexamp for your device from Plex Labs. Do let us know your thoughts on the same in the comments section below.

Via: Medium