Getting More Out of Plexamp

01 Start Here

Grab Plexamp from your app store, or at plex.tv/plexamp for Mac, Windows and Linux. Sign in with the same Plex account I invited and my music library shows up automatically — there's nothing extra to set up.

Worth switching on straight away

All of these are free, and all of them are off or hidden by default in the settings:

• Gapless playback — no silence between tracks. Essential for live albums and anything that segues.
• Crossfades — songs blend into each other instead of stopping dead.
• Loudness leveling — stops one album being twice as loud as the next.
• Visualizers and themes — Plexamp will recolor its whole interface to match the album art. Purely cosmetic, but it's lovely.

02 Radios & Mixes

My server analyzes the actual audio of every track — tempo, key, mood, texture — and Plexamp uses that to find songs that genuinely sound alike, rather than just guessing from genre tags. That's what powers most of what follows.

03 Guest DJ

This is the one most people miss, and it's the best thing in the app. Guest DJ hands your play queue over to Plexamp, which listens to what's currently playing and slips in other tracks that share its sonic fingerprint. You keep moving through the album or playlist you picked — the DJ just adds to it as you go.

There are several modes, and they behave quite differently:

• DJ Stretch — takes a sonic detour between your songs, wandering further afield before coming back.
• DJ Contempo — holds the mood by pulling in tracks from the same era.
• DJ Groupie — stays loyal and keeps feeding you more from the same artist.

Some modes drop in a single song at a time, others add several. Switch it off whenever you like and you're straight back in control of the queue.

04 Sonic Adventure

Pick a start track and a destination track, and Plexamp builds a path between them — a run of songs that gradually morphs from one sound into the other. Start somewhere gentle and end somewhere loud and you get a genuinely well-made ramp rather than a jarring jump.

It's a party trick, but it's a good one, and it surfaces material sitting in the middle of the library that nothing else would ever queue up.

05 Sonic Sage

Sonic Sage builds playlists from plain English. You type something like "sounds like Nick Drake's Pink Moon" or "songs for sitting on the dock of the bay" and it assembles a playlist to match.

06 In the Car & Around the House

Plexamp works with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, so my whole music library is available on the car stereo the same way Spotify would be. You can also ask Siri to play things.

Around the house it supports AirPlay and Chromecast, so you can push audio to speakers, a TV, or a smart display.

All of the above is free — none of it needs a subscription from you.

07 What's Free, What Isn't

Plexamp itself is free for everyone. A few of the cleverer features are tied to a Plex Pass — but here's the important bit: the sonic analysis all of this depends on runs on my server, under my Plex Pass. So the DJ modes, radios and mixes should be available to you at no cost.