Plexamp is Plex's gorgeous replacement for Winamp
Plex, the company behind the personal media server software by the same name, has announced the launch of Plexamp, its own replacement for the beloved, basically defunct Winamp player. Plexamp is the first result of another new Plex announcement: Plex Labs, a new "ethos," the company explains, that will bring exposure to community projects among other things. Plexamp, for its part, is a gorgeous audio player for macOS and Windows.
Winamp is a tiny audio player that was released about 20 years ago for Windows, growing in popularity to be the media app of choice for many. You can still download Winamp if you want, and there are still some people who will use it until it is truly unusable. For many, though, it doesn't hold the same appeal that it once did. Plex is here with a modern rendition of Winamp for those users.
Plexamp sports a clean, modern design that is emphasized as being small; it contains only a single window, as shown above. The audio player works like a native app on Windows and macOS, according to Plex, which says it is capable of playing essentially any audio format you have.
The company managed to pack some big features into the app, including the ability to both control other Plex players and to also be remote controlled.
Plexamp boasts a bunch of other features, such as gapless audio playback, a global activation hotkey, soft transitions like quickly fading out the audio when you pause instead of instantly stopping, plus there are visualizers for something to look at while listening to music (examples shown below).
As the images above show, Plexamp also supports album art with art key color extraction. That means that Plex's audio player is able to extract the important colors from an album cover and then use it to tweak the player's look so that it best matches the audio. It's purely cosmetic, but welcomed regardless.
A bunch of other features are joining those, such as loudness leveling for normalizing audio playback, smart transitions, SoundPrints, waveform seeking, library stations, artist radio station, "Library Radio" that uses the user's music library, plus "Time Travel Radio," which starts with the oldest music in the library and plays forward from there.
You can download Plexamp for macOS and Windows now from Plex Labs.