How exactly does the library radio work?

Plex Labs
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First of, thanks for Plexamp! It’s really great. Love the interface and also the soundprints.

I’m just wondering how the radios work. Mainly the “library radio”. I was under the impression that it gave a personalized radio based on my song ratings. Like it takes some seed songs from my highly rated tracks and creates a similar songs radio of some sorts. Is this not the case? If not then how does it work? Because it seems like the radio selects mostly random artists tbh.

My scenario is this: I have a kind of big music collection at almost 200k tracks, and most of it is metal because I myself like it, but my girlfriend listens more to pop and that kind of stuff. She has a bunch of highly rated songs as well. When she chooses the library radio, it plays her a bunch of black metal, death metal, grindcore etc. She’s not very happy about that :slight_smile: well it plays other stuff as well, but mostly not her style at all. And the server has plenty of poppy stuff as well to choose from.

So, can someone just clarify just what the library radio is getting the tunes from? @elan ? :slight_smile:

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The Library Radio is essentially a mix of a subset of tracks from the library including a few factors:

  • How popular the track is (last.fm rating).
  • How you’ve rated the track.
  • How recently you’ve listened to the track.

So it’s likely not going to work super well for collections where two people have “competing” styles in a single library.

Something your girlfriend could do is just make a smart playlist based on highly rated tracks, and shuffle that.

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Yup, both she and I are already using smart playlists a lot for that. But, we were both very excited to try this new radio feature for some exploration now when the library has grown so much. And there are so much “competing styles” that I can not listen to the radio either tbh :slight_smile:

I understand then, thanks for explaining. Can I make a suggestion then?

How about making it a bit more personalized? Perhaps it could work only from your highly rated or most listened tracks by basing the radio on artists similar to those. After a while, you can switch the seed tracks, but still sticking to what the user listens to, making the personalized radio keep going and going. That would create a radio with plenty of new tunes to explore, but still it would always be something tailored to yourself. It would be a more pleasant experience for people with large libraries and generally would be smarter IMO. And sometimes, it could play some of the seed tracks for you as well, making it a bit like last.fms “your mix” radio, where it sometimes gives you your own tracks but mostly tracks based around them. Everyones “library radio” would then be different and a more personal experience.

Also, as an argument for that idea:
Currently the library radio then works best with a smaller, more focused library because there won’t be as much music coming up that you dislike (pop → black metal for example). But in a smaller and more focused library, you’re not in a need of a radio that much because you can already shuffle the library, or parts of it.

Now take a bigger and less focused library, it’s hard to think of ways to shuffle it. Before Plexamp was announced, I was trying to be creative with creating my own “radio stations” by making smart playlists matching this or that genre. It works, barely, but is not like a smart radio of course. So a bigger and less focused library is more in need of a radio, and would benefit the most from it as well by bringing up songs the user didn’t even know existed on the server. It would actually bring good exploration. But currently, a bigger music collection works less well with the radio then a small one, because the genres varies so wildly.

So, again, it would be much more useful IMO if it was more tailored to the person starting the radio, making it viable for both smaller and bigger libraries.

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@d2freak ~ Just wanted to make sure you knew about artist radio (third icon on artist page), which sounds almost exactly like what you’re describing. You can start from a death metal artist, your girlfriend can start from brittany spears, and it should generate a nice station which will wander genres over time, but not at harshly as full library radio.

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@elan -

Is this explanation and the development of Plexamp based on Gracenote’s Music Discovery?

If you look on this site, you’ll know what I’m talking about:

From myself using the Plexamp application, perhaps, Plex since it uses Gracenote for its premium music suite should or is already using Gracenote Rhythm.

According to Gracenote:

Gracenote Rhythm is the secret sauce inside many of the world’s hottest streaming music services. Data intelligence and algorithms from Gracenote Rhythm help music fans build the ultimate radio stations and playlists based on their favorite artists, listening preferences and musical tastes.

There’s more on the website link, but I’m curious to know if this is where Plex got the idea to make artist stations or should use this as an extension of the Plexamp application.

Thank you for Plex. It’s made life easier.

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@SanchezHouse ~ The Gracenote technology is used for Plex Mix. The new Artist Radio feature uses other “secret sauce” :smiley:

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@elan -

Honestly, whatever is in the Artist Radio using other “secret sauce” is really good. It’s an excellent alternative to Plex Mix and I hope that the features for PlexAmp make its way to Plex Apps (iOS, Roku, the like) in the near future!

Keep up the great work.

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Thanks so much, glad to hear you’re digging it! :sweat_smile:

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@elan
Yes the artist radio works very well, and we both use that quite a lot. It’s nice when you know what kind of music you want to play.

But I guess what I’m trying to say is that sometimes you don’t know what you want, and in my scenario I don’t only listen to metal, and she doesn’t only listen to pop. And neither of us listen to all the stuff in the library (it’s for friends as well). Hence why I figured it would be cool if the “library radio” would be like a mix of all the stuff you listen to (and stuff similar to that). Kind of like last.fms “my library mix”. That way, it doesn’t feel so restricted like if you have to pick a seed artist yourself as is the case with the artist radio. It would be cool to just lean back and let Plex provide the music, which could be a broad spectrum of genres instead of just one style. And you could perhaps rediscover a certain style of music you listened to earlier in life that you had forgotten about etc or simply stuff you didn’t think about playing via artist radio, or maybe you forgot the artists name. It would be very useful.

I guess I understand that this isn’t what the library radio currently is about, but is it completely off the table for you guys to make a new radio station then? "My personal mix’ station? :smile: it could be a very simple thing and just use the same secret sauce as the artist radio but pick seed artists from your highly played and rated ones and it would be perfect. Probably people with larger music libraries would appreciate that a lot.

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@d2freak ~ appreciate the ideas, new radio stations aren’t off the table.

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@elan
Well, thanks for listening :smile: I would love to beta test such a radio if you ever needed that just so you know. Or discuss more details regarding the algorithms.

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@elan
I just wanted to add another note here regarding a more personalized library radio, that another big player, namely Spotify, currently has a similar thing to that as well which has proven very popular over there. I’m talking about the weekly discovery lists. They contain tracks that Spotify knows you already like combined with popular songs from similar artists to that that you might not have heard before. It’s the go-to playlist to put on when you can’t think of anything to put on. It’s very convenient and sometimes (and I’m ashamed to admit it) I switch from Plex for that automatic experience.

Bringing such a radio station to plexamp would make Spotify completely redundant as well.

It has been some time so can I ask, are there any plans for such a thing?

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Not anything specific, but we’re definitely looking to keep improving the existing stations, and possibly add more in the future. I agree with you that such a Discovery Station would be awesome :slight_smile:

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I would love to have Plex analize the music taking into account BPM so you could auto generate a Station/playlist based off this. This would great for exercise…

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I have a large and varied music library and find that I can listen to my Library Radio quite easily. There are a few times when I skip a song but works pretty well for discovering music in my library.

I think that a particular setting would make it much better - and more like a customized station. I’d like the ability to include or exclude a particular genre. I’m listening right now and a rap song is on, thumping and jumping. And then Bing Crosby starts singing Silver Bells. And then “recorded audio books presents an unabridged recording of Anne of Green Gables”. Audiobooks should be excluded. Holiday music, too.

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Thanks for the suggestions! A few thoughts:

  • You can avoid specific tracks being picked by rating them low.
  • We’ve discussed how we might solve the Chrismas-in-August issue (sorry, down-underites!) but haven’t found a perfect solution yet (genre, tag, etc.)
  • Simple genre-based stations might be interesting.
  • Audiobooks, IMO, shouldn’t live in the same Plex library.
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My audiobooks are in a separate library., yet played with my Library Radio feature. 2018-12-13%2015_57_23-Plex

I’d love to switch “Holiday” off. And “Country”. My wife would love to switch off “Jazz”. A nice “Genres to include in your library radio” screen might be great!

Thanks for considering additions to the feature!

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I just double-checked the code, and we very clearly DO limit the radio to a specific library, so I’m pretty confused. Are you sure you started the library radio but of the Music library?

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Yes, I’m in my music library. It looks like the Music library also includes that folder. My audiobooks library is pointed to the subfolder. :frowning:

Music Library: c:\music
Audiobook library: c:\music\audiobooks

That explains how they are included. But would be nice to exclude the genre. I can move the folder and repoint the audiobook library to resolve this issue.

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Anyone else notice lots of repetition with the Library Radio?
Love the idea of the Library Radio, but it seems to repeat same artists very frequently.

For example, I just used the Library Radio feature on 2x 6+ hour drives over the holiday.
Counting Crows played at the very least 1 out of every 5 or 6 songs. Sure, I have a lot of CC in my library - but not so outmatched by any other artist discography I have.

It started to get very annoying. A few other artists were played quite often as well, not quite as much as CC, but it was noticeable that certain artists were definitely playing quite often.

I have to imagine that just playing my library on shuffle would have resulted in a better mixture of music.

1 Like