I’m struggling to understand what order tracks are played when I click on the Play Icon (Plexamp, Windows) for an Artist with multiple albums. Sometimes it’s like the Radio option, while other times its plays an entire random album.
What I want it to do is play all the albums chronologically from the oldest.
Am I missing a server/app setting somewhere?
Cheers,
Jay
That is a very rare occurence. More likely to happen with audio books than music.
Therefore Plexamp won’t do it as default action.
When playing an Artist in Plexamp, you will get a shuffled playback of tracks across albums. “Smart Shuffle” is applied by default, which means more popular, but not recently played tracks are sorted to the top.
For your use case, you might have to create a playlist.
Humph!
Thanks for the reply, shame this is the default though.
I agree that the play icon should PLAY the artists tracks, chronologically.
If they want shuffle to be the default, they should change the play icon to the shuffle icon to indicate the shuffle functionality.
The idea has merit, IMHO.
There’s no semantic meaning to “playing an artist” like there is with playing an album, hence why we use the play icon. Same on Alexa with voice, “Play Counting Crows” plays an artist shuffle.
perhaps, but there is a semantic for the play icon, and the shuffle icon, no?
the ‘action’ for what to do at the artist level, maybe up for debate on personal preference, to shuffle or not to shuffle.
the ‘icon’ or iconography should match the action.
I’m with you on this, seems more logical and removes the need to create a playlist (which I rarely use anyway).
~ Jay
Could you elaborate what the use case is?
How often do you listen to the whole discography of an artist, in-order?
To put this into context, I recently pointed my Plex Server at my Music NFS mount and was impressed by the features of Plex Music management. I was using a whole plethora of other services to manage/play (locally and remotely) my collection of nearly 1K artist and their albums.
How often do I play a whole discography? Pretty much everyday. I maybe “old school”, but I tend to choose and artist and play all the albums (have done for years in iTunes et. al.) whilst working.
Sure, I agree, I can create a playlist to do this, but that would mean I’d have to create 1K playlists and keep them updated if/when I add new albums (which can be weekly as I’m an avid Bandcamp purchaser).
Being able to Play the entire discography of an Artist by simply clicking on the Artist Play Icon would be an absolute boon for me. Sure I’m and edge case 
Cheers,
Jay
I’ll just add my voice here saying that I would also expect chronological play of the discography, and I also somewhat-frequently listen to artists this way.
Music player apps’ obsession with shuffle has always confounded me just a little. Like if I go to watch Star Trek: TNG or re-read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, nobody assumes what I want is a randomly ordered selection of the most popular clips / excerpts. I’m not saying that would be an invalid way to appreciate those art forms, it’s just not the normal expectation, y’know?
Anyway, is there a difference between the shuffled Play behavior and Artist Radio? If not, or if the difference is minor, that makes me further question the benefit of what then amount to two “shuffle this artist” buttons in close proximity.
Invalid comparison, IMHO.
The number of music(!) albums which require the listener to ingest the tracks in their original order for maximum enjoyment is very, very low.
The number of artists where this even applies to the order of their albums is even smaller, by several magnitudes.
“Radio” only enqueues the top-rated tracks of an artist and then branches out and includes top-rated tracks from other artists (which appear in the “similar artists” list, and then also tracks from artists which are similar to the similar artists…).
These tracks can also be located on other Plex servers which have been shared with your account or on Tidal.
I don’t think I said anything about requiring. Shuffle’s a great and valid way to enjoy music and lots of music is produced by the artist one song at a time, with album order being unimportant.
But even a lot of music designed for radio or otherwise one-song-at-a-time play is still at least carefully arranged by the artist into the order they liked best. And many concept albums are designed more around that case than for one-at-a-time play.
I didn’t mean to imply music was just like TV or books or as likely to be serial. I am, as I said, confounded by music player apps seeming highly preoccupied with shuffle, but certainly it makes sense that it’s there.
Here’s one example. Klayton’s industrial rock project, Circle of Dust, was something for which he thought he was producing a final album in 1998. That album is titled Disengage. In 2016, he returned the the project with the Machines of Our Disgrace album, whose first track is titled re_Engage. That’s album-to-album continuity with artistic intent.
Or Dar Williams’ 1993 album The Honesty Room with the songs “Traveling Again (Traveling I)” and “I Love, I Love (Traveling II)” being followed up on in 1996’s Mortal City with “Iowa (Travelling III).”
There are also album-to-album changes that make an artist’s history play out like a narrative, either from purposeful changes in style (Sinéad O’Connor comes to mind here, with a big band album and a rasta album among others), or just from long careers and interesting lives (Marianne Faithfull’s voice changing during the 70s). Or any number of artists who have gradually shifted from one genre to another over the course of their career.
Gotcha, thanks.
Hmmm, I can’t agree with that, maybe “modern” artist have no preference to the order tracks are played, but I’m sure an artist lays out an album in the order which they would like the listener to follow.
Maybe I’m old, but I don’t want to listen to an Opera out of order or a Wu-tang album with all the skits out of order etc.
Playing a discography chronologically also show the “journey” the artist has been on with their music and how they diverged greatly across genres through their careers.
Sure, if I’m listening to Dark Techno or similar the chronological order doesn’t mean too much for some, but for me there is a wild difference between 1990’s Techno and 2020 Techno.
Cheers,
Jay
And you can do that in Plexamp. Press Play on the album.
It only doesn’t work that way when you press Play on the artist.
No disagreement here.
I just want to add, I’m loving Plexamp. It’s the only player out there at the moment that gives me the nostalgia of WinAmp but for the 21’st centry! I’ve hunted high and low for an all encompassing Music Manager and Plex has given me that and I’m truly grateful for the hard work and development of the Plex suite of tools.
You guys rock! Long live Plexamp!
I think playing the artist in shuffle as the default option is appropriate. It’s an ambiguous command, so the expected play order will vary between users, but especially in the case of a voice command, I think most people would probably expect to just get a shuffled queue.
I think you could probably create smart playlists for your use case, @r7pxrv. You’d still have to create a playlist for each artist, but they’d auto-update when you add a new album.
Yeah, I looked at smart playlists and yes it would “solve” the issue, but I have zero interest in creating nearly 1K of them manually unless I could automate the creation with a shell script (or similar), which I’ve not investigated.
Jay
Yea, I wouldn’t want to have to do that either, and I would certainly look into automating it^^ I haven’t looked into it myself yet, but the API does appear to support querying data and managing playlists, so it should be reasonably simple for such an edge case.
I’d like to add to the list of those who listen to their music chronologically pretty much all the time - I’ll pick a different artist and listen to their discography in order on an almost daily basis. At the moment I have to create a playlist or queue each album up, which can be very annoying when there are dozens of albums, or hit play on each album as I go, which interrupts my flow.
I can understand why shuffling the list might make sense as a default, but I’d definitely like to see an option to play an entire artist’s discography chronologically - it could appear on the dot menu underneath the icon out of the way of those who don’t care. It’s currently my only gripe whilst looking for a replacement for Google Play Music.
