I absolutely love the Artist Radio feature, and for what it does it does a fantastic job. However I find it pretty lacking in the “variety” department.
When Plex changed over to MusicBrainz I was really hoping for a better radio system, and while the radio did get better, due to better metadata, the actual mechanism didn’t change. So below is my proposal for what I think would make a much more intuitive radio experience, while being able to not only get more variety, but to easily control the variety as well.
Add an option to start a “Playlist Radio” based on a new or existing playlist, which essentially functions like the Artist radio, except it runs against ALL the artists in the playlist instead of just one.
When playing a playlist radio station 2 additional buttons are added to the playback ui, Thumbs up and down, or plus and minus, whatever you want them to be. (Think Pandora)
The (Thumbs UP) button would function as follows;
a. if the song is not the playlist it will add it to the playlist the station is based on.
b. if it is pressed a second time the song will be removed from the playlist but not blacklisted from playing again.
The (Thumbs DOWN) button would function as follows;
a. if the song is not in the playlist it will be skipped, and added to a “blacklist” for that station. (preferably in a way that songs can be removed from the blacklist if added accidentally.)
b. if the song is already in the playlist, then it will skip the song and “temporarily blacklist” for a certain amount of time. The amount of time should be set in the server settings.
c. if the song is already in the playlist, and has previously been temporarily blacklisted, then the song will be removed from the playlist.
If the devs at Plex were so inclined that could even use the users “star” ratings to “weigh” which songs you’ll hear first, and more often than others.
All the pieces to make this happen are already in Plex, we just need them to all be tied together. I believe this would be one of the single best things Plex could add to the music Library. It is quite literally the only thing I feel im really missing.
If your library is well rated, the suggested filters will provide a pretty solid ‘radio’ type of playlist. Although not based on any type of artist similarity, you could add other filters such as which genre/moods you want included or excluded.
That does look cool, and I’ll probably try it out. But that’s not a wife and kid friendly solution.
My main point in making the suggestion is that in the age of services like Pandora, Spotify, etc, it’s not intuitive to expect users to sit at their computer and manually create specially curated lists, while trying to filter through tags just to make a “radio type playlist”.
Smart playlists are an amazing feature, but you can’t make a smart playlist while driving down the highway. But you can easily throw a few songs in a regular playlist then hit the radio button.
once you get a good set of filters for your tastes, and saved as an autoplaylist, it is the same as a ‘radio’ for all intents and purposes.
I have been using it myself for a while, and it beats any of the built in radios, simply because it plays higher rated stuff and not just random bottom of the barrel junk from popular artists.
So I just did this, I created a set of filters to make a Grunge Playlist. It worked fine, made a list of great artists automatically.
But there was one massively glaring problem. Time and convenience.
I had to sit at my computer
load the plex web ui,
go through and create all the filters I want it to follow.
I dont have enough starred tracks to filter by rating, so ill have to allow everything for now, star as i go, and eventually go back and add a filter for starred tracks, but once I do that, Ill have to make sure to star any new tracks or they wont play on this list.
Finally I saved it as a playlist.
My wife and kids are not going to do this, hell I barely want to do this. Yes it works, but its not convenient at all. Especially considering that everyone in my house primarily uses Plex on iOS, AppleTV, or Android. No one except me has ever even accessed plex on a computer at all.
