I’ve had this request in the general discussions sub-forum for over 5 years. Seeing that this PlexPass-only forum exists, maybe it’ll get more traction here.
I’ve brought this up before, and from discussion with people, I may be a dinosaur, but I really like listening to whole albums in order.
When I use iTunes, I have it set up to do album-level shuffle, so it picks a random album after the current one finishes. That is: Pick a >random CD, play it, now pick another, play it, etc.
I’ve actually created a plug-in to that tries to implement this feature, but because of changes in the server, it’s currently broken.
I would love to see this as well. Plex works fine for my video needs, but my primary need is for a music player that will 1) work reliably with Chromecast Music and 2) shuffle by albums. Plex works reliably with Chromecast, but the music players I’ve found that will shuffle by album aren’t reliable with Chromecast.
Ok, still missing a feature that I use extensively: using Playlist presence as a criteria of a Smart Playlist.
E.g., I’ll create a “Christmas” playlist of Christmas music, then I’ll create a “Music to Shuffle” Smart playlist that specifically excludes Christmas music, because you know, who wants Christmas music in June.
Despite everything discussed here, and the very old posts in the other forum, there still isn’t a way of getting Plex to randomly choose and album, play all of the album in order, then randomly choose another album?
I just wanted to chime in and say that this would be a killer feature for me, especially in a world where every other player seems to be getting rid of it.
If you’re running the latest beta server, and you’re using Plexamp, you’ll now have the ability to shuffle albums. You even get a cool key combo to skip to the next album: Shift+CommandOrControl+Option+Right. (Our other apps are adding station support as well.)
I’m another classical music listener, and the “shuffle by album” is an absolute necessity. Quite frankly, the best two UI’s for classical music listening that I have experienced over the years are found in my 14-year-old Turtle Beach Audiotron and my 10-year old iPod Classic 160GB. Developers-- please see those units for the RIGHT way to do classical music playback. What’s so great? This:
–Can choose “Classical” as a Genre from the highest level menu
–Once chosen, the next level is to choose an artist (“Composer”), and after that, all works are shown as “albums.” Some works are just one track (The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky) while other works are multiple tracks (Symphony No. 5 by Beethoven).
–In both of these units, you can configure shuffle to be “shuffle by album” and “shuffle by song”. My default is “shuffle by album”
The end result of this UI and functionality is that I can choose “Classical” and then scroll to “Copland, Aaron”, press “play” and get all of my Copland music played back in random order, but keeping the integrity of the albums!
This is keeping me from using Plex on my iPhone 6 as my main music player. PLEASE add this capability. I am incredulous that 10- and 14- year old UIs do a better job than Plex for IOS today.
Another vote for this functionality. (in iOS App:) If you list your music by album, and then go the … menu and select “shuffle all”, you would expect to be shuffling albums, not tracks (until you read the small-print “All Tracks”)
I’ve been using this feature a lot and noticed something. I spend a lot of time on airplanes and don’t usually spring for the wifi because why bother. When I’m listening to the random album radio it murders my iPhone X’s battery. I’ve done a few experiments with it, turning off wifi/networking after starting the radio, and every time my phone starts to heat up a lot (almost to hot to touch) and starts chewing through the battery. When this happens I’ll stop using the random album radio and start playing individually selected albums and it’ll cool off immediately and the battery use will drop substantially. The first few times I plugged it in to the in-seat power, but that’s not always available. Additionally I’d like to be able to use this while skiing, which there isn’t a guarantee that there will be cell service while on the mountain.
So while this feature is great and something I enjoy a lot, I find myself unable to use it frequently. I like the eloquence of this solution without a huge overhaul to the music player, but it sucks that it is dependent on there being a network connection.
Just to clarify, there’s nothing significantly different about “random album radio” and e.g. shuffling your entire library. Both use “sliding windows” on the server side, and small chunks are passed over to the client as it needs them.
So it sounds like there’s some sort of a weird bug. Does the phone still get hot with other radios? Or with shuffling your entire library?
App debug logs may also indicate what the issue is.
Ok… nothing is happening how I remember it happening. I used to not see the radio stations when the app was in offline mode, but now after turning on airplane mode I see them. That’s what made me think that the radio stations required a network connection.
After turning on airplane mode I tried out the Library Radio station and the phone didn’t heat up, same with the random album radio station. It’s been a while since my last plane flight so I guess one of the updates between then and now fixed what ever the issue was.
I went back and did a more thorough test (had several flights stacked back to back) and confirmed that this is definitely not an issue anymore for me. Thanks again for the quick follow up.
