I have a wide mix of music (from Navajo Flute to Dean Martin to ■■■ Pistols to Beausoleil and more) and I have noticed that artist radio works great – except with my Zydeco stuff. When I choose a Zydeco artist and click the Artist Radio button, Plexamp will play a few songs and then stall until I select something new. OTOH, if I select my Zydeco playlist on random, it just plays all day long.
Very strange.
Generally, this just means it ran out of tracks; this is driven by a few things, including similar artists. You can see current settings for Similar Artists in the Tags tab of the edit dialog, and/or add new links yourself.
If you look in the logs for Radio: you’ll see it sort of talk about what it’s doing, but the most likely scenario is that it ran out of what it considers similar artists for the station.
Well, it stops after 4 or 5 songs and there are more songs on a single album by the artist than that. I would’ve thought that the same artist would be an automatic match as “similar” to themselves. I have three albums from one of the artists that this happened with (Beausoleil) yet it still stopped after less than a half hour of playing.
Thanks for the tip about the Similar Artists thing – it never occurred to me to try to “edit” an Artist and I never found those tags before when I edited albums or songs. FWIW (if the Plex gods are reading this) it might be nice to have a similar tag field for albums, too, since some artists actually play multiple different styles (e.g. Joe Jackson.)
@nurbles said:
Well, it stops after 4 or 5 songs and there are more songs on a single album by the artist than that.
The artist radio only plays tracks by the “seed” artist every now and then. We were striving for something different than just shuffling the artist. However, it’s possible we should work harder in the case where you run out of stuff 
FWIW (if the Plex gods are reading this) it might be nice to have a similar tag field for albums, too, since some artists actually play multiple different styles (e.g. Joe Jackson.)
The Plex Gods are reading this, and totally fair point, but that sort of data is not included in the metadata we retrieve automatically, at least.
I’ve discovered the same behavior for me as well. It stopped after 4 or 5 songs. Well if I select one artist and play that radio, it also means I want to listen songs from that artist, too - not just similar artists, right?
@unistyler ~ well, if you want to listen to JUST that artist, you can shuffle the artist. The intent behind the artist radio is similar to Pandora, where it doesn’t actually play a ton from the “seed” artist.
We could definitely tweak the heuristic for cases where there aren’t many similar artists, but the best and most impressive results for the feature are definitely when you have a big enough corpus of music…
Sure, I do understand the radio (although I don’t know pandora). But the radio should also include songs from the artist I choose itself and in addition to songs from similar artists - anyway I would ask myself “I want to listen songs from these artists, which artist radio must I pick to get the best collection out of it?” that doesn’t seem right. That’s what I was after.
@unistyler said:
But the radio should also include songs from the artist I choose itself and in addition to songs from similar artists
It does, just potentially to a lesser extent than you might prefer (I think it’s one track from source artist every 10-12 tracks or so, which is similar to Pandora).
I was going to mark elan’s second response as the answer to my question, but I cannot figure out HOW to do that! I would swear that there was once a “Mark as answer” (or some such) item on these forum pages (I have used it before) but it is no longer visible [to me, at least, using Google Chrome Version 64.0.3282.186 (Official Build) (64-bit)].
@nurbles said:
I was going to mark elan’s second response as the answer to my question, but I cannot figure out HOW to do that!
I changed the discussion to Q&A and marked it for you 
For me personally, if I’m using the radio feature I want it to “just keep going.” So stopping is an error.
What I’d suggest is that it should play like it is currently designed unless it runs out of songs, and in that case it should choose a random song from the original artist and start again.
This solves the problem for the case where it goes down a narrow path. I’ve had cases where, even though the original artist is well connected in my collection overall, the radio feature traverses a path that results in a less connected track. Which then causes the radio to stop.
I really do love the radio feature, just trying to make it better!
For me artist radio picks a single song for each of the related artists and then just stops playing. I have an artist with 2 related artists and it plays 3 songs and then stops. Really? It can’t just keep going picking songs from the 3 artists. I’ve been told “it works better” with more artists. So what is the magic number of artists you need for it to continue to pick songs to play? I think if you have just 2 artists it should just continuously pick between these artists. I want to use Plex for all of my music but I just keep running into badly implemented features that frustrate me. Please make artist radio actually work!
And saying connect up Tidal is a not a solution for the Rokus since you refuse to support it. Hmmm, maybe they way artist radio works is intentional to try to get you to get Tidal. Sigh…
