I only thought of it later on , but what I should have done was copy a sub section of music in for testing.
But hopefully in a few days you get the basics fully functioning. I can’t remember if you can turn the Sonic analysis on at the library level, as that would allow you to create another music library with a few thousand tracks that you could turn it on and try that.
Sonic Analysis is on a general basis, not settable for each library. I just checked 
Ok good to know.
I’m 200 miles from mine, but I thought you turned it on in general settings and then could turn it on on under advanced in the library. But it’s been at least a year since I looked.
I’m also looking at plexamp and have configured one of my pis as a plexamp endpoint. Plex server is installed in a celeron mini pc with 8 GB RAM, 128 GB M.2 SSD, and 1 TB 2.5 SATA HDD. I have to say it’s really good for my use case: choose an album and hit play.
You guys might be interested in the answers of the CTO of plex/plexamp about bitperfect playback to pi endpoints. I think it defaults to exclusive mode as I also lose (control of the audio device) roon bridge connection when I switch to plexamp.
Arthur I see exclusive mode as a good thing, sadly windows don’t have that option on PlexAmp or the ability to use a different output to system sound’s like Tidal does.
I think that a Pi outputting to a USB DAC might make a nice little streamer for many, though with all Chromecast and Airplay devices around now that may be less if an issue.
I haven’t yet got the Idea of how you will run it on a Pi though, through PlexAmp on your phone or through a browser connecting to Pi. How are you using it?
You install their headless client. It’s controlled by the app same as Chromecast or Airplay.
If you want a bunch of pis and DACs hanging off everything then it works ok, but if you already have a streamer or streaming amp the options are Airplay or Chromecast both limited and not gapless via Chromecast as far as I know. Not sure you can transfer a queue either to other zone. Pi support though is a step in the right direction
Does it support Digital HATS?
I read their blog post but it didn’t seem ready for prime time. Might be another useful option for work, currently I take a spare iPhone in to avoid interruptions.
They keep making good progress
Ok, well I checked further and there is a second checkbox in the specific library which selects “sonic analysis” so I guess you can!
Well, I am sorry to say, I am mightily impressed with the capability of Plex. I’ve indexed around 200k tracks now, and it’s still responding very well, both on local and remote networks. Database searching is lightning fast. No dropouts at all either.
Pretty robust software all told. Impressed. I still want to come back to Roon, but Plex is wooing me hard.
Hi, Michael. I have only used it for a few days. From what I can tell, it runs pretty much like Roon without the frills, magazine like UI, and the frequent disconnections (hey yo!). The main difference is that the Roon Core decodes the FLAC files and sends PCM to the endpoints, while the Plex server sends the FLAC files to the Plexamp endpoint where decoding and DSP happens. I installed Plex Media Server on a miniPC and added my modest library (320 albums, all FLAC). And then installed Plexamp on a raspberry pi 3B+ (DietPi), put in the token from my Plex Pass sub, and configured it to run on boot. I then used a browser to configure the Plexamp on pi to output to my DAC and make it bit perfect (removed loudness leveling, sweet fades, etc.). I installed the Plexamp app on my phone to use as remote, chose Plexamp on my pi as output and presto. Streaming is from the server to the endpoint. You can control the playback with your phone, computer, etc. It plays gaplessly and my DAC reports the correct sample rate. And it can stream to Chromecast, albeit not gaplessly. To my ears, I couldn’t tell the difference between Roon and Plexamp playback. Maybe my equipment is not resolving enough. But I am pretty impressed so far. The app is very snappy and search is instantaneous. Granted, it’s using my local library only. But there were times that I had to disable Qobuz in Roon just to play my local library and it was never this smooth. I haven’t gotten anything similar to the Roon squid or any disconnections to the server or the iOS app crashing! The app feels like a finished, refined product, whereas the Roon iOS app feels like a forever beta. Why is that? People have been talking about Plexamp for its mobile application, but it could be a serious Roon competitor in the future. I’ve attached some screenshots for reference.
Both are valid and work really well.
At home I almost use Roon exclusively, but the moment I am outside I am almost totally PlexAmp.
Hundreds of albums downloaded onto my phone and streaming from Tidal when I have 4G
Plex went through a period of instability (particularly on Synology when it created the updated app) but seems to have stabilised for the last year or so.
Glad that you are getting on nicely with it, but I would not rule out Roon again in the future. It’s a great app with some amazing capabilities
I agree, Im not ruling out Roon. I’ve been a long term user since the last 5 years. It just got to the point I was not firing it up because subconsciously I was realising it just probably wouldn’t work, so I was avoiding it. At that point I thought, time to end the sub. Every time I’d try to use it, end points would not be there, or it would cut out half way through a song, or album art wouldn’t appear correctly (minor i know, but camels and straws and all that). I’m just finding the press play and it works nature of Plex very refreshing!!
Thanks Arthur it does sound like they have made some good progress with it. Maybe I will dig a Pi out of storage in the near future and try it out on that instead of mobile.
Roon definitely needs more horsepower, but works like a dream on my i5 Nuc10. Synology runs on more limited hardware well, but doesn’t do a lot of the background work that Roon is constantly doing.
But it’s great to have two really good services and others that will hopefully push each other to get better in the future.
Same. You never know what problem will come up next.
That is sad, I am not without Roon issues myself, but they revolve around Sonos discovery issues that affect a lot of user’s.
Mostly got around it by spending a lot of money on Roon Ready endpoint’s 
Roon do need to spend time on reliability, but with users demanding ever more new features it’s unlikely to happen.
That time after iOS 7 when Apple did a full software reset is the kind of thing needed. Difficult balancing act to pull off though
yes i hear you. I had a hardwired setup at my last place which worked well, we moved out last year and I just can’t see myself doing it all again. I got some good mesh routers here thinking they’d be ok, but it’s not optimal, athough others seem to have good results. I don’t know. I guess I’d need to get a completely dedicated rig together, and hardwire as much as poss… but then I ask my self; why?
I have the same ROCK setup and a robust, wired network (that fixed a lot of problems for me as well as dropping mesh wifi) and still Roon becomes a pain sometimes. I think it’s the app, the iOS app in particular, how it communicates to the Core. Why can’t it display the album art quickly? Why does it lose connection all the time?! Sorry, devs…
But I’m not dropping Roon just yet. I use it to stream Qobuz. On the other hand, it’s really nice to see a competitor making a lot of progress.
So I bought an Orbi Mesh after I got into Roon and had nothing but drop outs and skipped tracks.
It made all the difference to me, total stability and with three mesh zones in the house I was able to move my Synology and Roon core back into my study and still have total reliability in the house (have a couple of Netgear GS108s connected to each zones to give Ethernet)
Now should you have to buy something like this I don’t know, but for me it was more of an excuse/reason 
I am mostly Android, but do have an iPad and iPhone that I also use.
The iPhone is rock solid but the iPad keeps getting kicked out of memory non stop
It’s weird that so many people with similar setup’s have such different experiences. My artwork has always been instantaneous, but I have read many complaints like yours. Roon often says they are DNS issues, so I run DNS servers on both my Synologys and DHCP on one to hopefully give a more robust set-up. Again should we have to do this, I can’t say and Plex doesn’t need it.
