Suzanne Humphries
Plex has unveiled a clever new feature for Plexamp, its dedicated music app. Dubbed “Super Sonic,” the feature is a neural network that analyzes your music library and finds sonically similar albums and artists, making your music listening experience even better.
Now while that sounds like a feature most other music streaming services offer, Plex takes a new approach to it. Instead of basing its recommendations on album and artist metadata, it bases them on the actual sound of the music, and honestly, it’s a good idea! This makes it easier to include obscure and indie artists, as well as those who didn’t include much (or any) metadata for their music. Now every artist can be included and your recommendations will be stronger because of that.
For example, if you love Taylor Swift’s last two hipster-folk albums—rather than her early albums, which have a different sound—the Super Sonic feature will create a “Sonically Similar” playlist. It will be full of songs from various other artists that sound similar to the songs from those albums. The goal of Super Sonic, according to Plex, is to take each listener on a journey through their music library unlike any they’ve ever been on.
Super Sonic is powered by AI and based on a “unique audio/music genome custom built by the Plex team.” In addition to giving you the various Sonically Similar playlists, Super Sonic gives you a few other ways to shake up your music-listening experience, like related tracks (much in the same vein as the aforementioned Sonically Similar playlists, but now aimed at individual tracks). It is designed to help you better explore your music library, and gain a more in-depth understanding of how certain songs and artists are related to each other.
There are also Mixes For You, which analyzes the albums you’ve been keeping on heavy rotation, blends them into mixes, and throws in other sonically similar albums. You’ll also have Track and Album radios, replacing Plex Mix, which plays either full albums or individual tracks that sound similar to one specific song you like.
Super Sonic has a few smaller new features that are worth mentioning, as well. On This Day will show you albums that were released on the current day going back decades. Album Types lets you organize albums on an artist’s page based on their type, like EPs, live albums, and so on.
You can check out Plex’s Super Sonic feature for yourself on Plexamp if you are a current paid Plex Pass and the current Plex Media Server. Also, it’s for macOS, Windows, and Linux only; ARM CPUs are unfortunately not supported. Interested? You can check out the details here and get signed up for Plex Pass. Happy listening!
