Plex this week launched Plex Labs, a new section of the company focused on sharing internal passion projects (think Netflix Hack Day) and community projects. The initiative is also tasked with sharing technical write-ups on Medium but that’s a discussion for a different day.
The first project to emerge from Plex Labs is Plexamp, a lightweight music player inspired by arguably the greatest music playing software of all time – Winamp. The idea for Plexamp started over a beer and quickly blossomed into a project that was worked on by a handful of people at Plex in their spare time. Its creators love music and they love Plex so merging the two only seemed natural.
Plexamp is a macOS and Windows app that pulls music from your existing Plex music library and presents it in a neat desktop interface. It works like a native media app meaning media keys for tasks like skipping tracks and pausing are all functional. Plexamp is compatible with “just about any music format you could dream of,” works in offline mode and is remote controllable / can be used to remote control other Plex players.
Plexamp also offers a global activation hotkey, gapless playback, soft transitions, visualizations and album art extraction which takes key colors from album artwork to use for various purposes like creating optimal opacity values for overlays and providing a palette for the visualizers.
It doesn’t stop there, however, as Plexamp can also normalize playback volume, improve transitions between tracks, create a graphical view of a track, create personalized radio stations and more. I don’t usually get too excited about new software but this has certainly garnered my attention.
Plexamp is available to download from our downloads section. If you’re at all into music and / or loved Winamp, it sounds like it’s worth a try.
