About a week ago I noticed that when I shuffle songs out of the Album view, Plex no longer shuffles in songs that do not have a star ratings on them. I only get those songs played that have been rated with a star.
That sounds like a bug was introduced in the last patch.
It’s an annoying bug, because I usually shuffle all songs in the library and then just rate them as they play. Then then get put into my playlists based on the rating I give them. Since the songs without a rating no longer get played, that ruins the whole process for me.
Thank you for any feedback on this.
Someone with the same issue as me! I posted this yesterday: Shuffle of music playlists only shuffling starred tracks?
Unfortunately, no matter how many times I mash the NEXT button, I only get a starred track. To get me by, I just filtered for all unrated tracks and gave them all a 3 star rating, as I use 4 and 5 for syncing to my device.
So maybe it is a bug?
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Does this mean you are shuffling only the tracks of one particular album,
or are you shuffling all albums in your library,
or all albums of a particular artist?
Has your library been converted to the new metadata from musicbrainz.org?
Take a look into the properties of your library, on the ‘Advanced’ tab, and see what is set as Agent.
I am shuffling all albums in my library from all artists. So pretty much my entire library.
My library has not been converted to the new metadata, or at least not that I know of. Unless Plex did it automatically.
My Agent is “Personal Media Artists”
Then it’s not converted.
The shuffling is first playing random tracks which are star’ed.
Only after those have been “exhausted” it switches to un-star’ed tracks.
Right. That’s what I noticed.
But that was never the case until about a week ago. Was there a change in this behavior in a patch or is this a bug?
I didn’t see anything about it in patch notes and that’s a pretty major change if it was done on purpose.
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Experiment:
Go to the main ‘Library’ view of your music library.
Without ‘selecting’ or filtering anything, just click on the ‘Add to playlist’ icon 
save this playlist as ‘All music’ (or similar)
Now switch to the ‘Playlist’ view and shuffle this playlist instead.
Does it behave differently?
Same behavior.
It only shuffles the “starred” songs.
Songs without a star never play.
Can you give me a percentage of starred vs. un-starred tracks in your library?
what happens if you create a filter which only has no star tracks, then shuffles it ?
also, this may be of use to you @ [TIP] [MUSIC] --- how to create an autoplaylist with random sort
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I have a total of 12,394 tracks in the library, spread over 413 albums.
About 30% are starred and the rest are not starred.
I star songs as I listen to my shuffled library. I have been doing that for about two years, until this week.
I have auto playlists created based on star count, and as I listen to my library, I star songs and they get put into the appropriate playlists.
For now, I can only give you a workaround:
Filter for rating=empty and then shuffle that.
Thank you for this.
I think I can create a playlist with all non starred tracks to get around this problem. Then just listen to that playlist. And it looks like as i star a song, it gets removed from that playlists. So that’s a good work-around in the meantime.
It would still be nice to shuffle my whole library though, and the shuffle to pick up ALL songs.
as a work around, you could create a filter like
using the shuffle method linked above, this should include a sql generated random list (versus whatever shuffle algorithm plex is using when you manually shuffle).
as you can see above, unrated tracks are included
Yea, I was just able to do that and it works well. The playlist them removes songs automatically as i star them.
But it would still be nice to get the old functionality back, to be able to just shuffle the entire library regardless of rating. Because no matter the sort, there is now no way to just play the whole library without any bias.
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using the &sort=random url will most certainly give you an unbiased random sort, using whatever filter fits your needs.
I believe that your issue with shuffle mode is still valid.
although I would assume it was an intended change, so that people get better ‘mixes’ from random play.
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AFAIK, it was introduced in 1.18.7
As much as I generally dis-like the “Radio” feature in Plex music, the “Library Radio” button still seems to shuffle the music and returns items that are un-rated. (Hint: Bring back “Plex Mix”)
So far as I can tell, that “Radio” is just another word for shuffle, although it does return rated tracks more often than unrated tracks
au contraire
Radio takes into account ‘related artists’, the rating of the tracks, if you listened to a track just recently (and a few other things)
