We set out to build a way to extract the most important colors from album artwork, and then render it in an aesthetically pleasing manner which might look something like looking at the artwork through smoked glass. Album covers also tend to have writing on them and occasional borders, all of which makes simplistic blurring problematic. For music, on the other hand, album art is album art and there’s no such thing as album fanart. Some prefer it blurred, some don’t, and these backgrounds can be carefully curated and are visually detailed. Movies and TV shows generally have dedicated “fanart”. UltraBlurįor as long as Plex has existed, we’ve always liked our backgrounds. Without further ado, let’s dive into some of the new Plexamp v3 features, because there’s a lot to cover. At the same time, the experimental apps can play with new ideas and get feedback from our community, iterating quickly. Plex Labs aspires to be a source of some innovation with these unofficial apps and we expect that over time - as already seen with the TREBLE player - the best ideas and technologies will be incorporated back into our official applications. The player is the primary user interface element, and it sits on top of everything else.īeyond this core, we wanted to use the application as a playground, if you will, to explore our libraries, discover new music, and have fun, all inside a beautifully crafted interface.Īs companies grow, they tend to have to adopt more rigorous processes and structure, and at a certain size even have R&D departments dedicated to innovation.Our simple but powerful duration-based offline feature is geared towards quickly downloading exactly what you need for a disconnected sojourn.When it gains WiFi connectivity, it’ll kick off a pre-cache, so if you drive into your garage playing music you’ll probably grab a bunch of tracks for the next time you leave. We pre-cache upcoming tracks (configurable up to 40) for the same reason.We cache current and next track to minimize buffering and speed up track skipping.We use the OPUS codec for the highest quality audio at low bitrates for fast startup on mobile.This sounds simplistic, but it informed a lot of decisions: For Plexamp v3, it came down to: play music fast, don’t stop. (Want to check it out for yourself? I highly recommend Expo, which is essentially a layer on top of React Native which makes the entire process from start to shipping much easier in many cases.) PhilosophyĪpplications should have a raison d’être. If this isn’t developer nirvana, I’m not sure what is. Thus, a single codebase can target 5 platforms (Android, iOS, macOS, Windows and Linux) with only tiny amounts of per-platform code. We also made use of react-native-web, which extends the portability to desktop through Electron. The TREBLE player has been shipping in our official applications for quite some time now, and we’ve been continuing to improve functionality, reliability and performance.Īs for the app itself, over the last year of nights and weekends, we’ve completely rewritten Plexamp using React Native, which is the most mature, productive and performant way to build cross-platform mobile apps for iOS and Android (sorry Flutter, although I think you’ve come a long way). It’s the future of audio playback across all Plex applications which can host it. We’ve also implemented a few effects plugins on top for spoken word audio: one for voice boosting, and the other for silence compression. It’s portable across almost all desktop and mobile platforms, and provides the features you might hope for: sample-accurate gapless playback, high quality resampling, Sweet Fades, soft transitions, pre-caching. Over the next two years, we worked to overcome both of those limitations.įirst, we set out to create a new audio player library we call TREBLE, built on top of a low-level commercial audio engine. The app itself was built in React, which is tied to the web. It incorporated an advanced player under the hood which provided features like gapless and crossfading and it drove a number of improvements to the Plex Media Server for music libraries, including advanced loudness analysis and library and artist radio.Īt its core, though, it suffered from a number of inadequacies which limited its potential: the player engine had portability and licensing issues beyond desktop platforms and didn’t have an easy way to add functionality (effects plugins, e.g.). The first version of Plexamp was a small, highly opinionated music player released for macOS, Windows and Linux.
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