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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • I like Plexamp but there’s a couple of things to be aware of depending on your music library that took me a while to figure out:

    • They downsample anything above 48kHz which isn’t a big deal but sucks if you have hi-res music. It won’t even tell you it’s transcoding if you check the dashboard and Plexamp will show it as playing at the actual sample rate which is misleading when trying to debug.
    • It doesn’t distinguish between explicit and clean versions so if you have both then it will just look like duplicates. You also can’t favorite just the clean or explicit version as favoriting one will do the same for both versions.
    • They don’t support Spatial Audio/Dolby Atmos(E-AC-3) music. Doesn’t matter if they are m4a or flac. Again, nothing about transcoding in the dashboard but the sound will be horrible. It does at least show in Plexamp that the song is playing as Opus. I know everyone says multichannel music isn’t worth it, but I wanted to try it out and was very disappointed when Plexamp wouldn’t play them.

    These probably aren’t issues to the majority of users with just their favorite songs in mp3 or flac 16-44, but it’s something for people with larger hi-res/multichannel libraries to be aware of that I recently learned.













  • Sure if it fails completely it will, but it doesn’t catch everything. Here’s a related story I have:

    At work we had a bunch of Lenovo X1 Carbons running windows that would have the usb-c ports die seemingly randomly on users which was a big problem since that’s also the charging port. There never seemed to be any similar root cause connecting the incidents and Lenovo’s support wasn’t any help. Our entire company is remote but luckily we had onsite support so for a while they would just come by and replace the whole motherboard each time.

    Finally one day while scheduling a repair the support guy I was talking to just said, “Oh I’ve seen this before. It’s just a bad update and resetting the CMOS battery by putting a paper clip in this hidden hole fixes it.” We had the user try it out and the ports worked fine again. Apparently they had run some windows updates that failed silently and were causing the hardware issues.

    From then on any time a user has had a hardware issue we can’t figure out we just have them try the reset and it has worked every time. This only happens probably 3-4 times a year but we only have less than 40 of these machines so not an insignificant amount.