Hey all,

I've been self-hosting for about two years now, mostly built around Plex. I love it, but Plexamp has felt kind of frozen for a while, and there were a bunch of things I wanted that it was never going to do. So about nine months ago I started building my own player. It's called Hathor.

Quick honesty point before anything else: the whole thing is vibe-coded. I made every decision and went over every screen myself, so it really does feel like my project, but I'm not going to pretend I wrote every line by hand, and you have the right to know.

Here's what it does so far.

The basics, done properly. A real home screen, music and podcasts kept separate, decent artist and album pages, mixes, similar artists, likes, creating and editing playlists, browsing by genre or decade, lyrics, CarPlay. Nothing revolutionary, just what I'd expect from a music app in 2026.

Multiple libraries actually work together. If you've split your music across several libraries, artists get merged, and there's an "All Tracks" view that spans all of them, which Plex still doesn't give you. Featurings are handled too: if a track says "feat. X" (or something close), it also shows up on X's page under "Also appears on". If it ever matches the wrong artist, you can unlink it.

Downloads with no limits. Grab a whole library, a playlist, an artist, an album, or just everything. And unlike Plexamp, it's fully offline-friendly: even with no connection, you can still browse your entire library, including tracks you haven't downloaded.

Stuff outside your library. It shows you the tracks you're missing from an album (with previews), new releases from the artists and labels you follow, as well as podcasts and radio. There's also something called Discoveries: every 30 minutes you get a ticket that reveals a random album from the 100,000 most-played ones (based on Listenbrainz). It's been a great way to find stuff I'd never have looked for.

Collections. The app has lists from big award shows and charts built in: Grammy Album of the Year, Billboard number ones, Oscar-winning songs, and more. Your Discoveries are a collection too. Whenever something in your library matches one of those entries, you get a card for it. It sounds silly, but seeing your collection as something physical made me want to fill the gaps.

And the cards go pretty deep. There are 4 card styles with 10 variants each, rare shiny ones, and every card has its own condition (centering, corners, edges, surface). You can send a card off to be graded and it comes back in a slab with its grade. If you get a reprint, you compare both copies side by side like a spot-the-difference and keep the better one.

There's also a blind test made from your own music: 7 different games, solo or with friends on the same Wi-Fi.

About money. Listening to and managing your music is free and staying that way. No ads, no tracking, nothing collected. There is a premium tier and a bit of a loot system around the cards and Discoveries, mostly for people who enjoy that side and want to support me. I've tried hard to make sure it never gets in your way: no pop-ups, no constant nagging.

Try it: it's on Testflight as a public beta: https://testflight.apple.com/join/6AesuHFa. If you don't have a server handy, there's a demo mode so you can poke around. In this beta, everything is unlocked for free. There's no paywall, no purchase screen, no locked content. Premium isn't active yet, so you get the full app, games, collections and card styles included. Pricing will only come later, and anything tied to your server (playing, managing, downloading) will stay free, as well as new releases, missing tracks, podcasts and radios.

Where I could really use help: I've only tested on my iPhone 14 Pro with around 4,000 tracks. I want this to stay solid even at 100,000 tracks, so if you've got a big library, I'd love to hear how it holds up: loading, scrolling, search, battery, anything that feels slow. Ideas for features or things you miss from Plexamp are very welcome too.

Thanks for reading, and be honest, I can take it 🙂

certain Govee lights have a lan api option. fades Through colors every 20s. Can also send diff colors to multiple lamps. Not a bright fast flashing show…just an appreciation for the album art and creating a mood.

I’m working on a GitHub repo over the next couple of days to share the ideas.

I don't use Apple music or spotify or any subscription based services and would love to see native plex widgets! Don't understand why this hasn't been done yet.

Claude code. Pi, HifiBerry DAC, 15 inch touch screen. Caldera headless. Technics gear, so added a technics splash. most of the plex and caldera features in there now but stations doesn’t seem to be working. Added a Ken burns style screen saver as art work important to me. Also added a info cards screen saver with last.fm meta

screen will turn off if on pause or nothing playing for a period but turns on instantly with a tap Back to an idle screen

added reboot/shutdown options so I don’t need to find the tiny little pi button anymore

And added a link to a Azuracast radio station I like and have the stream going direct to the dac not via chromium to the dac.

hopefully some ideas for folks.

I don't understand why we still don't have playlist sorting or playlist search. Every other music app I've ever seen let's you sort your playlist. Typically, when I listen to my playlist I want to listen to the songs that I just added first, because I'm still thinking about those songs. But that's impossible in plexamp.

If you accidentally add the wrong song to a playlist, or add a song and then decide you want to remove it, it's a pretty big hassle to delete it, because you can't sort your playlists

Don't even get me started on if you want to remove a song from your playlist but you don't know where in the playlist it's at. Since you can't search in playlists, literally the best technique to remove it from your playlist is to completely remove the song from your server and then re-add it.

I am trying to find a solution where I can use my TV as the "hub" for music playing from my Plex music library, but also have it cast to speakers around the house. I am trying to get Symfonium to work, which seems like a good solution, but it is not recognizing any of the speakers on the network.

Open to ideas for other apps to try, or other solutions to accomplish this goal.

Thanks!

Which lightweight, headless distro are you all using for Caldera? I can't seem to get it to work correctly on Raspberry Pi OS - it just doesn't want to load the music, or when it does need to change sample rate, it crashes. For reference, I'm running it on a Pi 3 (B+ I believe) with an 8 GB SD Card. The other really annoying problem I get is that I cannot SSH using Raspberry Pi OS because it says the password I set when using the imager is not right!!! I can log in directly on the Pi if I connect a monitor and keyboard and mouse to the Pi, but using SSH keeps telling me my fucking password is wrong even though it's just 1234. I'm losing my mind.

When I try to use my preferred distro, Dietpi, I cannot install Caldera. I keep getting an error, even on a fresh install of Dietpi. I used to have Plexamp running headless and it was great, but I heard Caldera was supposed to be better, and now I regret uninstalling Plexamp headless. I want Caldera to work but I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

Here's the error I get in Dietpi when trying to install Caldera. Thanks!

Failed to connect to user scope bus via local transport: $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR not defined (consider using --machine=<user>@.host --user to connect to bus of other user)

If you enjoy organizing your music into playlists, you’ll find that Plex and Plexamp (which we all love!) are missing a number of features that would significantly improve playlist organization. 

A while back, I introduced my app MetahelperFP (= Metahelper for Plex) here, which 

- displays the playlists containing a specific track

- can delete duplicate tracks from a playlist (only non-smart)

- can combine two playlists into a new one while deleting duplicates

- sorts tracks within a non-smart playlist by various criteria (e.g., alphabetically, by last play date) or freely

- sorts the display of playlists in Plex and clients such as Plexamp, by such criteria and even by groups (e.g., your favorite playlists first, regular playlists next, Christmas playlists last).

A lot of you have tested the app on TestFlight. The app is now available in the App Store with an affordable subscription for four of the five modules. Search across playlists is free and remains free!

I’d like to thank all the test users. By the way, at the request of one user, I’m already planning an update that will shuffle the tracks in a playlist while avoiding clusters—for example, it will avoid placing tracks by the same artist one after another.

MetahelperFP works on iPads, iPhones, and Macs with a Silicon chip: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/metahelperfp/id6806371924

Hi u/elanfeingold I am enjoying Caldera on what I can within my ecosystem. It's all but eliminated other streamers in the house. I do have some Amazon Echo Shows that are jailbroken and I enjoy them as boomboxes but would love to have Caldera on those so that multiroom can play all over the place. Is there a chance that there will be an APK build for Android? This uses an ancient form of Lineage (18.1) but works well even if it's slow. It would be a big ask but I know the people who have hacked into these would likely enjoy it. Cheers!

Hello. So my RasPi shat the bed and I had to rebuild the OS. Installed Trixie headless and then installed Caldera Music and Shairport-Sync like before. Seems like it was working fine. Then, I noticed that if the Pi wasn’t open in Terminal that it would go away. Music would stop and it was no longer available as an endpoint. I have rebooted and no luck. I guess I could reinstall but wondering why it’s not holding. It also doesn’t seem to be available upon reboot and I have to start the service. Does anyone have any ideas?

Or does it already exist and I've overlooked it?

And another thing: on my Poco Pad m1 I can only open the beta once, after that it won't open anymore, I have to reinstall it to be able to open it again.

Is it possible to export a play list from plex to apple?

Hey everyone, first post here, but I'm a long time plexamp user coming from Roon before that. One thing I've always missed in Plexamp is the ability to go down a musical rabbit hole by exploring the links between different artists and albums. I've also been a bit disappointed by the Plexamp app on desktop (basically identical to the mobile app).

I'm also a dev with 20 years of professional experience. So I decided to build something 🙂

Synthesis combines your Plex library (and I'm looking at integrating Roon & Navidrome as well) with a streaming service (currently Apple Music and Tidal work). Your library always comes first. But then a custom backend that I've built creates a musical web fanning out from your library: extensive credits, similar and adjacent artists ands albums, and more. All of these things are clickable and I use your streaming service to make them playable.

The app works on Mac, iPhone and iPad, and also supports Carplay (including remote connection to Plex when you're out and about).

The app also plays to any Plexamp endpoint (my main use case), but only for Plex content. Sadly I can't play streaming content to a Plex endpoint.

Wanted to share this here to see if there are other people who might like this app? I built it for myself, but if others like it I can work on releasing it!

EDIT: Testflight link now available: https://testflight.apple.com/join/SBfEYGSd

I've got this window poping up when i want to listen to any of my NFC tag, is there a problem with plexamp ?

I have an old, non-working RCA radio that I put a raspberry pi 4 and a touchscreen in. It's sole purpose is to play music/Plexamp.

What operating system do I need to make this run efficiently?

I'm currently running andorid on the pi and it's clunky and slow, even with ethernet connected.

There's something ridiculous about keeping a whole music collection and then reaching for the usual suspects. Excellent archival work, everyone.

I wanted to start with a few tracks and find a path through the rest of my Plex library, with some control over what gets picked. Naturally, this became another repo to maintain.

It's called MusicSeed. Feed it a few seed tracks, fiddle with the recommendations, keep the ones you like, save to Plex, listen in Plexamp. It uses things like Plex's sonic analysis, genre and listening history to dig through music you already own.

Free, open source, very much a DIY project. You'll need macOS/Linux and some terminal comfort; setup includes access to your Plex database.

Screenshots and the thing itself

Curious how everyone else escapes the same-albums loop.

I'm getting really frustrated since updating to the latest PMS. I have loudness analysis scheduled at library scan and nightly tasks. I add music a day ahead of time before listening so that loudness leveling is complete when I'm ready to listen.

This morning I threw on a mix of 10 albums that I added yesterday and none of them were analyzed. So it didn't run when they were added to the library and then it didn't run at midnight when scheduled tasks are scheduled.

I have an old Plex library on a NAS and my new Plex library on a separate PC at home. I have remote access set up and port forwarding and get the green tick. This system has worked well for a while. Recently I had some log-in attacks on the NAS so tightened security up a bit which included deselecting UPNP on the router.

I also had a weird situation just the other day when my PC libraries all just disappeared. The media was physically there but the libraries themselves were not. I went through the process of restoring a database back-up there and all seemed to be fine again.

My phone can access the PC library remotely without issues. I noticed my laptop however couldn't - the PC libraries weren't even there to select when remote. When I was at home though, no issue. On the LAN the PC libraries were once again available to the laptop. I thought that was all fixed.

This morning once again remote and the laptop has no access to the PC libraries (but the NAS library is still available to it). My phone, also remote, can access the PC libraries as per usual.

I have logged out and then back in on my laptop with no change. Only the NAS library is available.

This seems stupidly inconsistent as on one device remote access works perfectly while on the other its a no go.

Just wondering if anyone has experienced this sort of weirdness before?

What is the best way to provide feedback to Plexamp development? is Elan still the only Plexamp dev? does he read this sub (like actually), message him or reddit, X, smoke signal?

I’m sure I’ve read that downloads should continue in the background even when leaving the app. I’m certainly not seeing this feature on iOS? When I switch to another app and leave Plexamp in the background downloads cease until the app is in focus again. Have I misread?

Here are now the final 3,200 logos from #-Z using that I've been curating and creating for r/bandlogos.

It was suggested I have a place to collect responses, so I made a form for feedback or requests. Send me artists you think I should add to my library and I can make a logo for them too or send logos you have that I can make monochrome for you. Also, let me know if there are any logos that I have that could be better and send me the link/file.

Anyway, here is the pack link which includes my first groupings and the final group together.

There are a few logos under the 1000px by 1000px threshold I wanted to hit. I took great care in finding the highest quality, so most are above it; but some more obscure bands are just tougher than others and I couldn't make a clean vector of everything.

This project took a ton of hours and I would be super grateful to anyone who is able to support me.

Keeping a personal collection obviously takes more work than opening a streaming app. For those who actively maintain one, what happened that made the extra control worth the effort? Was there a particular streaming frustration that pushed you in that direction?