Plexamp’s Radio mixes and Mix Builder needs to have the ability to add filters similar to those found in smart playlists. Specifically the ability to exclude certain attributes from the algorithm’s selection.
I have really enjoyed Plexamp for a while, and like the Mix Builder and radio options, however I’ve ran into one particular situation I haven’t found a good way to work around.
I did look for prior posts and did find it partially discussed here, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten anywhere before being closed.
One of the best examples driving my request is the need to exclude holiday music from being randomly selected. Pick any builder/ radio combo and the issue is most artists have done some form of holiday / Christmas track or album. I have ensured all albums of that nature have an appropriate style tag and I can make smart lists to play only Christmas music but during the remainder of the year the radio mixes and mix builder will often throw in Christmas music because it doesn’t have a way to know to exclude them without filters.
There are other scenarios that would be useful, such as leaving out live versions, and other tagged aspects. But the biggest for me is when an artist has albums of two very different types of music that get treated as one when looking at the broad selections that radios/ mix stations use.
I haven’t found any good way to work around this. So I just skip when needed, but depending on the artist (if they have a lot of Christmas albums) this can mean skipping very often.
Examples:
Artist: Pentatonix exclude Christmas (They have more Christmas albums than non-Holiday ones, so any mix is very skewed for them)
Artist: Elvis exclude Gospel (when the goal is to have a mostly Rock radio station or vice versa)
I’m guessing this isn’t a huge deal for most people, but I’d still really love to see this improvement. Thanks for considering.
I’d like to add to this request, and maybe add a bit more context to what would be a great addition.
One thing I’m unclear on is what populates the “Style Radio” section. When looking through my music on my plex server and selecting a particular artist or album I believe you can see both a top level Genre (i.e. Pop/Rock) and also a Style (i.e. Alternative/Indie Rock). When I look at “Style Radio” options in Plexamp, it doesn’t appear that all possible Styles in my library are included (possibly due to not having enough content for each of them to populate a radio). Also it doesn’t appear that the top level Genres are available to select (like Pop/Rock). So my questions are:
Is it possible to create a radio for a top level genre (i.e. Pop/Rock)?
Are styles filtered from the selections if there isn’t enough content in your library for that style?
Now onto the feature request, it was kind of mentioned above, but it would be really nice to create stations with multiple genre/style or other filters that dictate what’s included (both inclusive and exclusive). Example would be: My Example Station Include Styles: Adult Alternative Pop/Rock, Album Rock, Blues-Rock Exclude Styles: Post-Grunge
My Advanced Example Station Include Genre: Pop/Rock Exclude Style: Country-Rock, Art Rock Include Decade: 1970s Exclude Tags: Christmas
The idea from this would be stations would only include music that both contains ALL “include” filters and does not contain ANY “exclude” filters.
Is it currently possible to create stations with multiple styles?
Is it currently possible to create stations with any advanced filters?
Are any of these features considered for future development?
Thanks, I’ve really loved Plexamp since discovering it about a month ago!
I think this is a great feature request.
I would like to elaborate on this post as I have a slightly different use case but that joins what’s being discussed here:
In the mix builder you choose artists.
For some musical styles there is sometimes artist that exists for decades with dozens of albums and some newcomers with only one album or two (Or maybe you only possess a few albums for some artists)
Hence, the few songs of the newcomer gets entirely diluted inside the mass of songs from the older ones and you only get a chance to hear it once every 100 songs…
So it’s right it would be nice to be able to filter some music by style/tags/whatever but it would also be nice to filter any album directly from the mix (plain simple)
For instance, Let say that I want to create a Mix including “Snoop Dog”, but I dont want the mix to be unbalanced by its massive discography (and finally listen to him every two songs …)
I would like to be able to filter some of his albums (regardless of the type or anything else)
