I LOVE Plexamp, and I love the Library Radio feature. I have a huge library and a bad habit of downloading more than I actually listen to, so Library Radio really helps me process my horde. I probably listen to Library Radio, no joke, 6 or 7 hours a day.
But I have read that Library Radio picks its songs based on ‘the most popular tracks for an artist on Last.fm, your ratings, and your recent listening history’. What happens if an album in my library has none of those things? Say, it has no match on Last.fm, I haven’t rated it, and I haven’t listened to it in years?
I have a lot of ‘various artists’ compilations, some of which are fairly obscure. I actually originally downloaded a lot of them to add some spice and variety when I’m listening to my library on shuffle, but I notice that Library Radio never seems to pick anything from any of them. So I wondered if this was due to the way Library Radio works.
If not, is it possible to add “wild cards” into the algorithm? That is, every once in a while, just play a song that is an unbiased, unweighted truly random song from the library? I love Library Radio because it ISN’T ‘truly random’, but I wouldn’t mind a little truly random spice in there every 10-15 songs.
EDIT: In the meantime, would rating every single song in my library that doesn’t already have a rating a ‘3’ allow it to be considered? Or am I imagining this phenomenon to begin with?
Another example: I have mp3s of my own band from high school in my library. I have them ID3 tagged and everything, but obviously they have no last.fm data since we were terrible and never released anything. But I’ve never heard my band come up on Library Radio, ever.
unfortunately radios don’t use track level data, it goes by artist/album popularity/genre/style/etc.
as far as last.fm data, not sure how much of that is actually used for generating the radio queues, and plex isn’t likely to detail it as I’m sure they consider that part of the ‘sekret sauce’ of plex.
When playing a Radio or Smart Shuffle, Plex prefers to include tracks that have not been played recently. This sets that “recent” period (default is 2).
2
probably not a lot, as you have seen.
plex doesn’t use ‘track artists’ so, you generally won’t get a lot of tracks from ‘various artists’ unless the whole album genre/popularity/etc are close enough for the particular radio algorithm that is active.
