I use Plex almost exclusively via my Amazon Echo, with the command “Alexa, ask Plex play library radio”.
Recently, viewing the library with the windows client, I sorted the tracks by the number of plays. Here’s what I found:
1 Song was played 10 times.
2 Songs were played 9 times.
12 Songs were played 8 times.
10 Songs were played 7 times.
15 Songs were played 6 times.
34 Songs were played 5 times.
60 Songs were played 4 times.
147 Songs were played 3 times.
327 Songs were played 2 times.
791 Songs were played 1 time.
17916 Songs were never played.
Overall, 2583 tracks played represent only 1399 different songs.
If we look at just the tracks played 6 or more times, we find that 40 tracks (0.2% of the library) were played 284 times (11% of tracks played).
Clearly, there is something screwy with how tracks are “randomly” selected.
(Really, I’ve already heard The Bay City Roller’s “Saturday Night” more than one needs to in a lifetime…)
Library radio selects popular or highly rated tracks that you haven’t listened to recently (within the last few days, essentially). Generically shuffling the library is what you’d want to do for a random selection of tracks to play back.
If it’s then basing it purely on popularity, it becomes self-feeding: The first track it selected becomes the “most popular” and therefore more likely to be picked again – and now it’s twice as “popular” as any other track, and so on.
I should note that on rare occasion, I asked for a specific band to be played (about 3 times in the last 6 months). They appear on the list as having been played once, so that apparently did not affect their “radio” selection.
Popularity data is fed in from last.fm as part of our metadata pipeline. Library Radio is not influenced by the number of times you personally play a track.
My most played track is Saturday Night, by the Bay City Rollers (10 plays)
According to last.fm, it has “Listeners 70.9K, Scrobbles 258.2K” (A 50 year old one-hit wonder)
Second highest (9 plays each) are Gabriel Le Mar vs. Cylancer’s Flight 108: (Listeners 1,802, Scrobbles 5,891) and Zeus’s “Marching Through Your Head” (Listeners:10.4K, Scrobbles 41.1K) (I don’t believe either of those were ever released as singles)
As opposed to, for example, the never played “A Day in the Life” by the Beatles (Listeners 699.2K, Scrobbles 4.4M) or “Love Story” by Taylor Swift (Listeners 802.9K, Scrobbles 7.1M)
I have also found that to be true. My solution is to also use the Emby for Alexa skill. It is definitely random. But it is a huge hassle to set up, compared with the Plex skill.
However, I noticed fairly recently that there is an actual Plex playlist called “All Music”. I just tried the command, " Alexa, ask Plex shuffle playlist All Music", and she seems to have shuffled the main “Music” library. (I have a number of specialized music libraries such as “Music - Movie Soundtracks” which do not get included.) Then again, Plex may still be doing the last.fm thing, too soon to tell.
That is versus just saying, “Alexa, ask Plex to play some music”, which is the same as asking for library radio. If you “ask Emby Home to play music”, you get true random.
