I am having trouble with how Plexamp is handling my compilation albums. I have almost 14000 tracks in my library, and 600 of them are on compilation albums, all tagged “Various Artist” as album artist. The media metadata search works on them fine, each album has several tracks marked as popular, and there are full descriptions and artwork for each album. Sonic Analysis was run on every track in my library.
My issue is that it seems that Plexamp is ignoring these compilation tracks, even using different methods. I noticed the following:
When tapping “Show Similar Tracks” from a Various Artist track, it never displays other tracks from the compilation. This is strange because many of these compilations are very similar in style (pop and rock hits of the 80’s mostly). It’s like the similar tracks logic works one way but not the other… compilation tracks find lots of matches but none of them are other compilation tracks.
When playing Library Radio, compilation tracks only show up about once in every 500 to 1000 songs (most of the time they are not included at all). My collection is over 4% compilation tracks, so I would expect to see them much more often.
Track Radio seems to never play compilation tracks at all, even when starting the radio from one of these tracks. This is probably linked to issue #1 above?
I have seen other posts over time about these issues, but I haven’t yet found any resolution. Can I get someone from support to check out my library and see if they can replicate my issue?
Similar tracks has no special case for Various Artists. I’ve tried it with a few different albums over here and it shows similar tracks. Make sure your V/A albums actually have sonic data (one easy way is seeing if they have the icon on the album page, which is the album radio action, powered by sonic data).
I double checked that Various Artist tracks are considered by Library Radio, and they are, but it also made me recall that we’re picking top X tracks per artist and not per album (since this would give uneven bias in the station for artists with more albums). So that’s what you’re seeing.
Part of the heuristics for track radio include looking at similar artists. Various Artists are almost never going to show up there, so there’s some bias against them.
I’m not seeing that icon on any of my albums at all. Is that in Plexamp or in Plex on PC?
As for #2, this explains it. I’d like to request that we can have the option to reverse this logic. In my opinion, the artists with more tracks and album definitely SHOULD have more bias. Imagine if you had 990 Beatles songs and 6 songs by Limp Bizkit. Would you want library radio to play 50% Limp Bizkit, since they are 50% of the artists? Nope. My point is, if I bought more tracks from one artist than another, then I definitely DO want to hear more of that artist. And since V/A makes up 4% of my collection, I want to hear them 4% of the time.
Just to be certain, this is the icon. If you don’t see it, you likely don’t have sonic analysis for the album in question.
We played around with the different modes a while back and settled on this one as being all around better. Consider an actual radio station which played way more of a certain artist; this tries to be balanced. If you want something more aligned with your thinking, shuffle All Music with smart shuffle enabled (server setting, enabled by default).
I understand your design decision… but I use Plex because I don’t want to listen to the radio where all artists get equal playtime I want every album to be represented equally, even if 50 of them are the same artist. This is especially true for various artists. Could we maybe have an option in the future?
I’ll give smart shuffle a try again, but the last time I did, it had the same results. No compilations.
So if I had nothing but 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s compilations (Various Artists) in my library, track radio would have very little to work from, is that a valid statement?
It is interesting that the Artist is listed in the compilation as “Artist”. Is track radio using “Album Artist” to pull the tracks from?
icon on the album page, which is the album radio action, powered by sonic data).
