We started Plex Labs just over two years ago to provide, among other things, a playground for new apps (both our own, as well as 3rd-party apps that struck our fancy) that build on our awesome media platform. Plex can be like a fractal—everyone has their own view of what the most important parts of the platform are, and you can zoom into any one of these and spend a lifetime working on perfecting and improving that little area. In other words, a thousand zen gardens…

A Brand New Plexamp

“The only kind of writing is rewriting” – Ernest Hemingway

When we first launched Plex Labs, our first release was Plexamp, a tiny, highly opinionated desktop music player. But after a year of updates, things went quiet. Had we abandoned it? Was the llama tired of being whipped? Had the zen garden suddenly filled with weeds? Nope. Inspired by the promise of the first releases, and our shared love with Hemingway of a great daiquiri, we decided to rewrite the whole thing from scratch, add a ton of features, and then release it (today? Sure why not!) on five platforms: iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux.

One hundred and ten is the magic number

We’re calling the new version 3.0 (although 3.11 might have been more appropriate) and there are so many new features that we’ve written an entire Medium post about them. If you already use music on Plex, you’re going to love it. And if you don’t, maybe it’s time to give it a try?

Over the last year, our small group of fearless testers has gone through 110 (that’s one-hundred-and-ten) betas, and it might be easiest to let their words speak for themselves:

To our eyes, it doesn’t suck.

The new version of Plexamp is Plex Pass only. And if you need further incentive to go ahead and grab that glorious Plex Pass, Plexamp isn’t the only app we’re launching today…

Introducing Plex Dash

A dash of power

As you might imagine, plenty of us here at Plex run our own personal media servers and like keeping a close eye on them. So why not a single-purpose app dedicated to server administration? Like many things in the history of Plex, the genesis of Plex Dash involved scratching some itches. First of all, we wanted a beautiful way to see all playbacks, even across multiple servers; something you might repurpose an old iPad for, duct taping it to a wall in your secret lair. Something to gaze at while you stroke your hairless cat. You know the drill.

Secondly, we wanted a fun way for you to help edit your artwork and make your library even lovelier during any spare moment: one-handed while wrangling the kids, or in a few minutes of downtime between video calls. And last, but not least, we wanted raw administrative power: scan for new media, fix incorrect matches, check on server resource usage, tweak library settings, even view server logs live.

Plex Dash is built on top of the same codebase as Plexamp – check out this Medium post for more details about its many features. Plex Dash is available for all Plex Pass holders today, on iOS and Android.

Apps for days

So we’re super excited to share these two Plex Lab apps. Because they’re lab-born, we’ll continue to tinker with them, and you should keep in mind that they are not officially supported. But if you’re excited to check them out, head to your friendly neighborhood app store (Android, iOS) or our brand new plexamp.com site (for the desktop apps), take them for a spin, and let us know what you think in our Plex Labs forum!