I have previously been a bit of a die-hard about only relying on locally-stored music - even though the quality of the metadata in my files, which have been accumulated and ripped over a couple of decades in a wildly inconsistent fashion, can be quite variable. Anyway, I recently upgraded to an unlimited data plan, and was quite looking forward to using Roon ARC, particularly through Android Auto. Instead I’m using Plexamp in my car. A lot.
Plexamp seems to be a lot more reliable. Some of the freezes on ARC might be connection based, but a lot seem to be just software-based. Anyway Plexamp has none of these issues. I seems to down-rez to Opus 128 at the first sign of trouble, which doesn’t bother me too much in my extremely noisy vehicle. It pulls just enough metadata (album art mostly) to look fine on an android auto screen.
But what’s really surprised me is how Plexamp does quite well what I would call, low-power discovery, and makes it reasonably accessible from the Android Auto UI. ARC basically offers you a browse of recently added or played albums, its daily mixes or search. As well as Roon Radio based on the last artist played (which seems to end up on Baba O’Relly regardless of what pre-1980 music I had playing). Plexamp offers you a series of slightly gimmicky but generally solid genre-based or mood-based radio stations, or just lets you play within artists you own (I generally see Plexamp’s poor Tidal integration as a feature rather than a bug though I am sure lots of users would disagree).
I maintain two roughly similar libraries, one for each of Plex and Roon, which is a chore. But absent a bit of a bump to Roon’s reliability (or an easier way to swap connection reliability for sound quality) it’s probably Roon in the house, Plex on the road.