I’m wondering if (or why not) the Plex dev team even bother to look at these feature requests. One of the most basic of requests, going back now over 2 years, is the ability to play random tracks filtered by Genre while using Alexa.
Why can’t we simply say “Alexa, play music from the [insert choice] Genre” and get a random seed play? Is filtering by metadata like that really that hard to accomplish?
Most frustrating however is how many times this has been requested, and the apathetic response from the Plex team.
I understand it’s not the same, but have you tried requesting an artist radio? Something like “Alexa, tell Plex to play Lake Street Dive radio.” Chances are that if you start one from an artist who performs in a particular genre, you’ll get more music from that genre. I’m pretty sure artist radios consider an artists moods as well, not just the genre.
Just a thought, not intended to dissuade others from voting for this request. Which you may want to do yourself, by the way .
I have a massively stupid music collection that has been organized with a directory specifically called “Christmas” (where, unsurprisingly, I store all of my Christmas music ), and so what I’d like to do is have random songs from only that directory being played - so ya, kinda of like Radio, but by Genre (and yes, all of the MP3 files in that directory are fastidiously tagged with Genre: Christmas).
As I read through the community archives, it really feels like the Plex devs are more interested in movies, rather than music, even though I’ll posit that there are far more users with large music collections versus users with large video collections (OK, I have both, but my music is now taking up more than a terrabyte of storage). The ability to import a playlist seems crippled and/or extremely complex (and c’mon, a M3U file is basic to parse and generate, so why the grief?), and having something as basic as the ability to stream by Genre of music sounds like music player 101. It’s doubly frustrating as it appears this functionality is available in the Plexamp app (at least the Android version) - so why not the desktop/home version too? Plex coupled with Alexa or Google Home could crush Sonos if they were smart about this, but I guess supporting music doesn’t pay the bills in the same way as streaming bad TV content from the 90’s does, so… ¯_(ツ)_/¯
You have my vote. Sometimes I like things to be broad. Not to mention, others who aren’t as savvy might get confused by artist vs artist radio, etc. It still feels like Alexa integration is still quite basic when it comes to music.
As for video content, that’s a whole other concern, but I don’t think Alexa and Plex will ever made a perfect marriage until AI can carry full interactive conversations vs dictionary responses. Then again…now I’m off topic O:)
@johnfoliot I created a smart playlist using the custom filters for my Hawaiian music… then say to Alexa “Tell Plex to shuffle playlist Hawaiian.” Then wait about 10 sec because my server needs to stream to AWS then back to me, but hey better than irrelevant commercials.
The plus - it updates the playlist with new music that matches the filters.
The minus - Sometimes you may need to tweak it if you get undesirable results.
Looking forward to the PseudoTV feature so I can generate video content as a shuffled tv stream using the smart playlist custom filters.
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), and so what I’d like to do is have random songs from only that directory being played - so ya, kinda of like Radio, but by Genre (and yes, all of the MP3 files in that directory are fastidiously tagged with Genre: Christmas).