MOTS ans moodwheel are alive

For B&O fans who were fans of the MOTS (More Of The Same) function of the Beosound 5, please note that a new, improve version has arrived into Plexamp but only available for subscription users of Plex (I got a lifetime account for 70€ a long time ago but the promotion reappears from time to time) and only with a Intel-based music server (sadly I'm running an ARM server).

See how it works here :

Super Sonic: Get Closer to Your Music in Plexamp! | Plex

And for the fans of the Moment Moodwheel, Deezer just launched a copy of it with "Flow Moods".

Get in Touch with your Feelings with Flow Moods - Deezer Press (deezer-blog.com)

As always, B&O was far ahead of its time, releasing features that are of real interest (The "I can listen to all the music of the world, so now, what will I play?" question.)

 

Plexamp: A must have! It brings so many different ways to start a music journey, in your sofa or in your car, and can address your thousands albums collection with no pain.

The Moment’s MoodWheel was far from reaching 1/10 of what Plexamp is offering and will offer (I have the honor to be part of the beta testers).

@Mbee: je suis un lecteur assidu de votre site, bravo.

mbee:

And for the fans of the Moment Moodwheel, Deezer just launched a copy of it with "Flow Moods".

Hopefully, we may see it coming to B&O products. At some point, I was asked by B&O if Deezer Flow could be an option to replace Moment’s MW, Flow Mood would be THE ideal replacement, even without including local music, Plexamp is doing the job supersonically already!

Plexamp Sonic Adventure adds another level to the music experience: choose at least two tracks from your collection and Plexamp will take you to a music tour between them leveraging sonic analysis. Very surprising and very enjoyable to listen to on a B&O setup.

Does that run in/on B&O or is that an external thing (that could be streamed to anything AirPlay2 and/or Bluetooth)? 

External.  In fact, "extremely external", but many folks consider that worthwhile to get its features, as described in the first post. (Similarly, some people run Roon on an external device rather than using Deezer within B&O, because it's so useful.)  The original Plex app and the affiliated (see below) PlexAmp app are streaming players, so if the device you are playing on supports AirPlay (i.e. Apple), you can stream its output to your B&O gear.  Most casual users would subscribe to Tidal, but you can integrate your own music library as a streaming service by running a Plex Server yourself!

With no preparation at all, just now I streamed to a Beosound 1 via AirPlay from a MacBook, just running Plex's web-app user interface in Safari. Obviously I had to use System Preferences/Sound to set the AirPlay device as output speaker, and could only stream Tidal preview song snippets.  But running any iOS player app will have AirPlay integrated.  You can download their Plex app yourself, or try out their UI at:  https://app.plex.tv

Plex supports a broad spectrum of devices for both the player app and the server, ranging from the obvious (player on iOS, Android, Mac, Windows; server on Mac, Windows, many Linux NAS) to the truly odd (player inside Sonos services; server on Netgear Nighthawk).  You can check out the basics at:  https://www.plex.tv/downloads .  There are modest costs: USD 4.99 to unlock the full iOS app from the free version; a subscription to Plex Pass (USD 4.99/month, USD 120 forever) to run many of their services, including the PlexAmp app.  But the basics are free: server on your own computer, player on any device **local to your own network**.  

It starts to get fancy (& tricky) when you get to, e.g., transcoding video to run on particular players natively, or pulling your content to your devices over the Internet, or downloading (& maybe reducing) to play offline, or... the case mentioned above: running the (separate) PlexAmp player app, which supposedly works well but is "unsupported" (a Plex Labs project).  In part this is because the app scans your music library, groveling thru the actual sound data, required to run many of its features, including the Sonic Adventure.  Is the "trouble" of downloading their PlexAmp app and signing up for their Plex Pass service worth it?  It sounds really exciting, but I took the very stodgy (and free) iTunes Mac / iTunes Remote iOS app method for most of my listening, only turning on the DLNA server in my Synology so tap-to-play also works on the Beosound 1.  My big concession to listening more broadly is a Spotify subscription, and their app's "radio built from this album" is mostly OK enough.