DLNA/Plex Music Players?

[haravikk]

So I've finally lost my patience with the increasingly bad iTunes after Apple insists on making it worse with every update, and continues to fail to add h.265 support (I want to download new content in this for the huge file-size savings, as well as re-download some of my existing content where possible).


Anyway, I've had Plex Media Server installed for a while now, to make streaming all my content to a Mac Mini easier, however I've retained iTunes for playing music locally on my main machine (which is also my media server), but I've grown sick of iTunes, despite having been a Stalwart since v1.0.

What I'm wondering is whether the are any good music players that can load music from Plex? Or DLNA, which Plex also supports?


On my Mac Mini I'm using OpenPHT, which is great for a remote, but a bit clunky for a keyboard/mouse (it hides the latter by default), it also seems to prevent a machine from sleeping (it can put the machine to sleep via its own screensaver feature, but that's not ideal on a non-media centre machine). I'm currently trying via the web-app (localhost:32400/web) which works well enough, but as far as I can see there's no way for it to support media keys (play/pause/prev/next keys on keyboard), or to pause automatically if I switch to another user account (I have several for different purposes).

So yeah, can anyone recommend a good music player that supports Plex/DLNA? I don't need anything especially fancy, just the modern basics of shuffle, queuing and playlists, plus a decent interface (good use of album art is a bonus).

 

[haravikk]

No suggestions? This seems to align with my attempts to find anything; there are some but they're very primitive and not especially usable, which is a shame, so I'm stuck with iTunes for the time being.


Out of curiosity then, would anyone else be interested in a decent DLNA/Plex compatible media player? Since I still very much want to switch away from iTunes for handling my centralised media, and am a programmer, I'm thinking I might take a stab at making something myself.

I'm thinking similar music playing capabilities to iTunes (playlists + queuing), probably focusing on the album view with searching (as that's what I use). Main difference being that it'd be connecting to a DLNA or Plex server, storing nothing locally beyond a cache.

Anyway, if there looks to be some kind of demand for it (and willing to pay a few bucks) I would put more effort into it, particularly presentation, otherwise I'll just do the minimum to get what I want from it.

 

[sracer]

No suggestions? This seems to align with my attempts to find anything; there are some but they're very primitive and not especially usable, which is a shame, so I'm stuck with iTunes for the time being.

I hear ya. "Think Differently" is not something that many of today's Apple customers do, so don't be surprised by the lack of responses to a query like this. Not ideal, but you might want to investigate using VLC. It is supposed to support DLNA servers.

After years of frustration with an all-Apple solution for sharing media in the house, I settled on Plex. It worked the first time out of the box and continues to work without any issues.

 

[haravikk]

After years of frustration with an all-Apple solution for sharing media in the house, I settled on Plex. It worked the first time out of the box and continues to work without any issues.

But are you using it for music? If so, how are you playing it?