Plex launches Plexamp: A music player for macOS with all the bells and whistles
- dec
- 19
Plex's passion project division, Plex Labs, launches a minimalist music app for macOS.
If you're a cord cutter or the type of person who loves to access their media from everywhere, chances are you know the people at Plex. Today it's passion project division, known as Plex Labs, launched its first product called Plexamp. It's a music player macOs that is designed to be powerful and beautiful, and it certainly seems like it checks off a lot of boxes for the die-hard music lovers out there.
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Feature rich
In a blog post by Plex Labs, Elan Feingold lays out exactly how Plexamp was inspired by software that came before it.
"It all started over a beer — as most great things do — re-envisioning what a tiny and powerful music player might look like in 2017. The most classic and beloved small audio player, Winamp, was first released almost exactly TWENTY years ago. Written in a low-level language, it ran on Windows, and was limited to playing files on the local (or networked) filesystem."
Elan goes on to write about all the features that Plexamp can offer, and it's certainly an impressive list. Plexamp can pretty much handle any media file you throw at it, can be used to remote control other Plex players and can be remote controlled itself, and it can even work offline making those long flights a little more bearable. That's just the tip of the iceberg too. Plexamp has some very unique features including, a global activation hotkey to make finding any track, album, or artist as quickly as possible, soft transitions to makes pausing, playing, skipping, and switch tracks more pleasant to the ears, and album art key color extraction that pulls colors from the album art to create complimentary visualizations.
You can see a full list of all Plexamp has to offer in Elan's blog post.
Minimalist design
Plex Labs found it very important to keep the design of Plexamp as minimal as possible and went to great lengths to ensure the final product was as unobtrusive as possible.
"Literally the only requirement we had was "small"; Plex has plenty of bigger apps already, but nothing that sits unobtrusively on a desktop, beguiling and delighting. We even forced ourselves to limit the design to a single simple window."
Of course, the app does have some customization options to adjust the look and size al ittle bit, but as you can tell by the picture above the design is meant to be simple, beautiful, and almost unoticeable while it's sitting open on your desktop.
What do you think of Plexamp?
Let us know in the comments down below!