Feature Request: Creating mixes out of playlists and/or recent additions

Plex Labs
1

Hi, I have a feature request for Plexamp, which I just started using and really like.

The way I typically listen to music is that I find and add some new artists/albums/tracks to my library on a regular basis and then listen to those (and maybe related songs) on random for a while, until I go hunting for something new. But as far as I can tell, right now you can only create mixes and radios from a list of artists, genres, moods, or entire parts of the library, new and old.

What I would like to see is an option to create mixes/radios from recent additions to the library, like the tracks or albums added in the last X days, the time frame ideally being selectable, maybe up to a month, or freely. An alternative might be to allow the creation of mixes out of a list of albums, just like you can with artists right now, but if you added three dozen albums to your library and you want to mix those, that would be a lot to select.

Alternatively, or additionally, an option to create mixes out of playlists might be interesting. That way you could create a playlist from the last X albums manually and mix that, or create a mix from your playlist of your favorite songs of all time.

Basically: I’d really like to see more options for create mixes and radios, with a focus on the ability to filter for recent additions.

Edit: After thinking about this a bit more, adding mixing playlists would certainly be the most versatile way to implement this, since every user can create their own (smart) playlists, with whatever filters they want, and then create mixes and radios based on those. But since that’s limited to the PC, more mixing options inside the app would also be great.

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I made a “Recently added” smart playlist using the filter “Date album added”. My playlist shows albums added in the last 3 months, but you can choose whatever you like. This works for me. The playlist can be played in random order. Since it’s a smart playlist, it will automatically update as you add new albums to your library.

3

Yea, that would work to a certain degree for me as well. But I feel like it’s more of a workaround. For example, I’m bolstering my collection right now, and I’ve added dozens of albums over the past few days. If I were to create a playlist out of the hundreds or thousands of tracks I might have after a month, I’m actually not even sure if the entire playlist would fit on my phone, so I’d have to cull the list manually. I believe the mix/radio function would apply perfectly to this case, as you’d get a random selection of titles from a certain collection of tracks/albums/artists at the press of a button. Especially since you can specify the duration of the mix, that’s just insanely convenient.

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I like to use a smart playlist but you can also add a “not listened to in X days/weeks/months” and that way you always have a selection of fresh tunes flowing through your downloads!

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Smart playlists are certainly a nice tool, but there’s no way to automatically randomize them, is there? So that you could download a randomized mix based on a smart playlist? Because if I create a playlist out of the songs added in the last 30 days for example, and in the that time frame I added thousands of songs, I might not be able to download that entire playlist to my phone to shuffle it there.

Creating mixes out of playlists would give you just that little bit of finetuning to get a mix out of the exact things you want.

6

Plexamp automatically randomizes smart playlists which don’t have explicit sort criteria so you can download a random sampling.

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I didn’t know that yet, that’s interesting. But… it doesn’t solve the problem, does it? I just tested it, I created a smart playlist for a few albums, limited the amount to X, because if I could download the entire playlist I could just shuffle it in Plexamp, and then kept refreshing it. While Plexamp did randomize the tracks, it only randomized the first X tracks of the first album on the smart playlist, because that’s what the limit limits the list to.

If smart playlists could be set to randomize themselves from the entire pool of tracks it filters for, so you get a random selection of X tracks, that would give me what I’m looking for I believe. You could create a playlist for the new albums of the last Y days, limit the songs to X, and then get a randomized, but limited selection of all new albums.

I think mixing playlists would still be more versatile, but it would work =)

This is partially off-topic, but couldn’t this also help with the Christmas song problem from the other thread? You could create a white(play)list, filter out songs/genres you don’t want, and even if you have tens of thousands of songs on that playlist, you could play/download a limited random selection of them, without the ones you don’t want. Maybe not a perfect solution, but certainly a functional band-aid.

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Don’t do that.
The limitation is applied when you pick the “play”-length of the playlist to download. Don’t do it beforehand.

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Oh, you’re right, that’s good. But if I tell Plexamp to download 1h of a smart playlist, it seems to take the first X tracks on the playlist that make up 1h of playtime and then randomizes those. Is it just me or this unintuitive? Wouldn’t it make more sense to take random songs from the entire playlist? Or if there’s a reason for it, maybe an option could be added?

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it probably means your smart playlist is ordered. If you’re so inclined, have a look the the app logs for something like this: Sync: Playlist xxx with content key yyy is sorted: zzz.

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You’re right, it did say that it’s sorted in the logs. I also saw the sort=artist.titleSort&[...] parameter in the URL. Is there an accessible way to change that? I tried changing sort to random, and I could see the smart playlist apparently randomizing itself every time I refreshed and played the download on Plexamp, but the resulting queue was still the same. It was only after recreating the smart playlist that I got it to randomize on Plexamp. I don’t know exactly why the playlist was sorted, because I didn’t select that anywhere.

Well, even though I think this process could be more intuitive, I guess this way I can solve my problem. Thanks for the assistence =)

12

I think that implies that you sorted the view when creating the smart playlist in the first place :thinking: There doesn’t seem to be a way of changing the sort.

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It certainly does, but as far as I can tell there is no sort button of any sort when creating a smart playlist out of albums, so I really don’t know how that happened^^

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If you change this away from the default, it will get incorporated into the smart playlist.
You can remove the sorting parameter from the end of the URL in the address bar (in this example, it says &sort=originalTitle%3Adesc) and then press Enter.

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I see. While I don’t remember doing that, I guess it’s possible that’s what happened. Thanks.

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