Plex People, do you use PlexAMP?

Like the title says, I was wondering if those of you guys who are using Plex for Movies/TV Shows, also use PlexAMP as your daily driver for listening to music, or are you using Spotify/YT Music/Prime Music/Apple Music et. al.?

Please shortly state why/why not :slight_smile:

I did for a while, and the app was at least quite good IMO.
Later on I decided that I actually needed the space more, as the music I was listening to was on Spotify anyways.

These days Iā€™m using YT Music (because of Premium (as my kid HATES ads whenever heā€™s watching something)) and cancelled Spotify.
The app is quite a bit lacking in comparison with Spotify, but I canā€™t defend the cost of keeping the Spotify sub since I rarely get to use it these days and the music selection is pretty much the same on YT (at least what I found so far). :slight_smile:

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Ah this is a good topic!

I currently use Spotify, but I hate that itā€™s costing me hundreds of Ā£ a year when some months I hardly listen to it and their app is shit and can be very laggy.

Iā€™ve been toying with the idea of sourcing all of my music (legitimately of course :disguised_face:) and then running some sort of self-hosted solution. Iā€™ve just never had the time to actually do anything about it. I think the biggest thing Iā€™d miss would be the ability to find (nearly) any song instantly. I donā€™t like the idea of having to source my music elsewhere and then import it as I know I just wonā€™t have time. Not sure if thereā€™s some automated way of doing this.

If anyone had a self-hosted setup please chime in as I am interested to hear what others are using too!

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Same as @daffy basically. I used to self-host (using Airsonic, Plex didnā€™t have Plexamp back in the days) in combination with Lidarr, but for 2$/month Iā€™m subscribed to YouTube premium family, so I just donā€™t bother anymore. For music, a single streaming service suffices, so I donā€™t feel the need to pirate it, especially not for the extremely low cost.

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Thanks for all the replies so far! :slight_smile: Itā€™s really interesting to see how everyone is dealing with this. @Solaire 2ā‚¬/mo for yt family via VPN I assume? :slight_smile:
I am always hesitant to get one of those YT Premium VPN deals, as e.g. my android phone and all my subs are powered/linked to my Gmail/Google account.
Do you then just add another user to YouTube (that of the vpn yt family)? Also, re-subbing all the channels and playlists would also be a pita in my case.

@daffy definirely seems like the best option in your case. The gf shares yt premium with a friend, so Iā€™ve also seen YT Music, but I am with you in so far that I prefer Spotify app/discover :slight_smile:

@Will to be or not to be. That is the question haha :smiley:

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Yeah I used a VPN, I subscribed in India. The best solution if you donā€™t want to risk your account is simply creating a new Google account, add the family subscription to that account and then invite your ā€œregularā€ Google account to this accountā€™s family. Iā€™m subbed on my ā€œregularā€ Google account and have been for years, nothing happened and I doubt something ever will happen. Then again, Google is probably used to seeing loads of IP addresses and countries on my account since I travel a lot, so donā€™t take my word for it :slight_smile:

If it wasnā€™t for Google home I could just add you to our ā€˜familyā€™ since I have a few slots left.

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Ah, that makes sense. No worries, Iā€™ll have a look and maybe try what you suggested (creating a new account) :slight_smile: Although, wouldnā€™t a new account these days also require another (indian) phone number at some point?

Using main Google acc is another option, but yeahā€¦

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IIRC only if they detect abuse from your IP. And even if they require one, thereā€™s services that will provide you with a number, no questions asked.

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Right, I have a 5sim account :smiley:

Gamsgo (which also offers to join flix family) offers to let you join yt families for 2,80ā‚¬ without the need for any vpn, so thatā€™s also an option.

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Never seen Gamsgo before, but it looks super interesting. If you buy YTP via them can you see how it handles showing your details to others like @Solaire has mentioned above? I also use Google home and I wouldnā€™t want people in my ā€œfamilyā€ to be able to see all of my info / call me etc. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Just name and profile picture and mail address as long as youā€™re not the ā€œmanagerā€ / ā€œownerā€ of the family (source). If I were to create a subscription from an alt account and invite people there all would be fine, but Iā€™m on a legacy price plan so I preferably wonā€™t.

If you care (which I do understand), just set one up with other people from HB. Weā€™re family after all :wink:

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Not sure, as I only used Gamsgo for Flix, but for that it worked well :slight_smile: Flix pw can be seen in dashboard and you get your own profile. If you buy 12 months in advance you get some extra discount :stuck_out_tongue:

Maybe just try with a throwaway gmail account for a month and see what you can see about others.

What I like about gamsgo in general, that they take care of all the ā€œmanagementā€, and I donā€™t need to fiddle with Indian vpn and trying different CCs to see which works with what. Granted a bit more expensive than if done yourself, but itā€™s cheap enough and really comfortable

They also sell IPTV to existing clients should that be of interest. Itā€™s not shown on public page.

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Thanks both. Sounds interesting, I will have a look into it over the weekend!

@Ympker are you able to give the pricing for the IPTV? Thanks!

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I have been ā€œdowngradedā€ from VIP User (IPTV is only visible to VIP Users, which are users who purchased any other service from them in the past x days), so I canā€™t exactly say. I think it was along the lines of 8ā‚¬/mo. Their live chat usually gives you 24h free trial no questions asked if you ask them regarding this :stuck_out_tongue:

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Nice one, thank you!

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PlexAMP wasnā€™t out when I first started hosting my music and its never really seemed to catch up to other options.

Iā€™ve been using Navidrome (https://www.navidrome.org/) as the music server which will also do most of itā€™s functions over subsonic and the like for compatible clients. On android phone, Iā€™ve been using Ultrasonic (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.moire.ultrasonic) and on my linux desktop, Supersonic (GitHub - dweymouth/supersonic: A lightweight cross-platform desktop client for Subsonic music servers) lately, though just a browser tab works fairly well too. Can create playlists and have them syncā€™d to a phone or whatever device so I tend to just add new stuff to lists through my desktop.

I use Lidarr (https://lidarr.audio/) for grabbing music though Iā€™m experimenting with Lidarr-extended (https://github.com/RandomNinjaAtk/docker-lidarr-extended) currently which adds in deezer and/or tidal support to fill in the gaps automatically. It seems to have some interesting features but itā€™s also based on the dev version of Lidarr where I had been running stable, so Iā€™m still trying to figure out if the bugs are from the extended or the dev part.

There are a few others Iā€™ve heard about but not yet checked into - Deemon, deerix, lidarr on steroids, streamrip, orpheus-dl

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I hadnā€™t come across this, I shall take a look :smiley:

I used to spend a considerable amount of time working on my music library, as I listen to a lot and Iā€™m very fussy about music being tagged correctly and consistently (the hardest part given that most artists suck at tagging their music).

PlexAmp has come a very far way since itā€™s initial release, and I donā€™t particularly have anything negative to say about it anymore. With that being said, the biggest flaw with self-hosted music is new music discoverability: simply as it doesnā€™t exist. I listen to a lot of music, and losing this discoverability sucked. So I ended up seeking a paid solution

I pay for YT Premium through Argentina, so I tried out YT Music for a few months. While the experience is okay, itā€™s not particularly refined. In addition to this, they have this strange issue where you end up getting stuck within a closed-loop recommendations system, meaning discoverability plummets. Itā€™s also pretty bad at recommending music thatā€™s actually similar to what youā€™re listening to (understandably, metal sub-genres are a bitch).

I pay for Deezer strictly for easy music procurement for my own lossless library. I use a Go wrapper I wrote around a public downloader for Deezer to help clean up the downloaded music (e.g. stripping album version info from the album title, like deluxe edition). For anything I canā€™t obtain there (and thereā€™s a lot of it), Iā€™m in a certain RED private tracker which almost always has what Iā€™m after.

For the past 2 years, Iā€™ve settled on Spotify (paying for a family account with friends, cuts it down to Ā£2.90/mo each). I donā€™t really have any issues with their apps; however, their group session implementation is God awful. I love to use it, either if Iā€™m with friends for a barbecue or on a car trip. Unfortunately, it disconnects people randomly and all in all is just a terrible implementation. But as a platform, Spotify really canā€™t be beaten. Their discoverability is the best Iā€™ve used, though I did have issues for the first 6 months. I listened to a specific artist a bit as a new album had released, and Spotify somehow always found a way to shoehorn that band into the mix of whatever I was listening to. I ended up unliking all of the bandā€™s music in Spotidy for a while which seemed to fix it. I havenā€™t had the issue since :sweat_smile:

I donā€™t listen to my Plex music library all that often, but itā€™s nice to keep it there since thereā€™s music there that canā€™t be found publicly anywhere else, and itā€™s all lossless.

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I mainly use Plex for music, and I use Plexamp.
I tried quite a lot of options, but ended up choosing Plex. (Though buggy importing metadata, Plex gets it right after a few rounds, none of the others did. I tried quite a few options, should be an older thread/topic on this here.)

Paying for Spotify etc. never was an option, as I have too much music not available there. I moved to Plex when Google Play Music was end of life, since YT Music just didnā€™t work out well (couldnā€™t even browse by genre) ā€¦

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Just found out Prime Music got upgraded from 2 million songs to 100 million songs (before it was 2 million for prime members, and 100 million-ish for ā€œunlimitedā€ plans for like 8ā‚¬/mo).
There is still an unlimited tier now, but Prime members now get 100 Million songs and no ads. Still can only shuffle, though. And I hate Prime Music App&Website. Very much prefer Spotify :stuck_out_tongue:

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Plexā€™s metadata is actually spot on, itā€™s usually that the media you have has inconsistent or wrong metadata. Hence why I wrote a wrapper to cleanup all downloaded music :sweat_smile:

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