For managing your home media library, Plex has long been one of the best options on the market. While it originally focused on taming your extensive collection of movies and tv shows, Plex has more recently shifted to cover your music library as well. And just yesterday, announced several new features and enhancements to managing and playing your tunes a little more convenient.
Headlining the new release are several new features, including updated Sonos playback, Android Auto support, new music discovery methods and more.
The rise of steaming and digital access to movies, tv shows and the like have left personal collections of DVD and Blu-ray Discs in the past for many. And while having physical copies of your favorite flicks and series is appealing for some, there’s no denying how convenient it is to load up a film without having to worry about hunting down the disk. Plex launched back in 2008 as a perfect way to get the best of both worlds, and now the home media software is looking to apply the same mantra towards your music collection.
Why chose Plex? For one, you add in your own files, so if you have a massive collection of CDs or digital content that wasn’t purchased from iTunes or other sites, Plex goes above and beyond to organize your content, provide album art as well as meta data and make it easier to listen to your favorite jams. And because Plex supports a variety of audio codecs, audiophiles will be able to rock out without having to convert to more lossy standards like MP3.
Yesterday’s update brings with it a few new notable means of listening to your music like official support for Sonos, Chromecast Audio, Alexa and more. Sonos support has been a works for some time now and has been one of the most requested additions to Plex’s roster of tie-ins. Plex for Sonos now allows you to enjoy your library with features like multi-room audio, support for playing both FLAC as well as AAC files and more.
Plex has sent some love Amazon’s way, now supporting the Echo Spot and Show. In both cases, asking Alexa to play music from Plex will now provide related album info and artwork.
In terms of actually managing your music library, Plex has bolstered its efforts to explore your music collection with the release of Plexamp, its desktop audio player. Radio stations have also been introduced to Plex, which allows you to discover new tunes similar to artists and albums you already know and love. Both of these will be rolling out to Echo and Roku devices. Additional add-ons like Last.FM support help you share your listening habits to other sites.
While many of these features have been included in previous Plex releases thank to the beta program, all are now officially being rolled out. I’ve personally been using Plex for the better part of four years now, and couldn’t be happier with media management skills. While I stream just about all my tunes, those with a large collection of purchased music should definitely look into what Plex has to offer.
To get the full scoop on what’s new in the latest Plex release can head here.
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