“Genre Radio” will use the Genre from your embedded meta tags.
“Artist Radio” (i.e. when clicked on a particular artist’s preplay page) will primarily use the “Similar Artist” information.
Pretty much all radios (except “Album”) will also use the “popularity” of a track as well as your own ‘Star’ ratings to place “better” tracks at the beginning of the generated play queue.
If a track has just been played recently, it will be “demoted” for a few days.
You can’t use it. Due to the preference for embedded genre tags.
Ok, everything you mentioned makes sense. The only problem for me is it gets difficult to manage all of it with a library as large as what I currently have. Which is why the agent is probably recommended rather than embedded tags, but unfortunately I’m fussy as to how things are categorized. I guess I’ll have to do some thinking as to whether or not I want to start going in and editing my “styles” and “similar artists” so they match how I want the radios to work or simply try the agent method.
I guess that’s why I was mentioning that the filter/shuffle features work so great for me. It is a much more simplistic method to get the results for me. I know it probably isn’t as cool as having a mix builder, or radio, but that way I can achieve the results I’m looking for without all of the fuss. Sometimes simpler is better.
works best with 3-6 artists
you may want to expand the ‘degrees of separation’ to 2 or 3 with a smaller library, 367 artists and 15 genre not likely to provide a lot of variety.
Is there any ETA on when the Randomness bug will be fixed for Plexamp? I have tried using the Genre or Mood radio features and it is constantly bringing up the same artists/albums and not even playing others at all. I would love to see this get resolved!
The update process depends on your server platform. Some (Windows and Mac) should auto-update, if configured to. For Linux, downloading and then running the latest installer should do the trick:
Edit: I should also note, you’re running a very old server version! There have been a lot of improvements to everything since October last year, which is when your current build was released.
I’m running version 1.20.2.3402 now and I’m not seeing any difference with this randomness bug. When I play Genre radio, the same artist/albums keep popping back up out of the hundreds I have of the same Genre.
I have 517 albums under the Genre of “Punk”, and some of the bands that those albums are under have a dozen albums in their discography. Yet I continually see the same one album from that band come up over and over and over again. It seems only one album from every band (all are tagged the same) appears in my Genre Radio. Sometimes I will see a song from that album, then another song from the same album appears 4 songs later. It is very frustrating. It seems the shuffle function in the Plex app is much more randomized than the “radio” features on Plexamp.
As you can see Propagandhi has 7 albums. I have the band tagged as punk, and all 7 albums tagged as punk. But when I choose Genre Radio “Punk” the only album that appears over and over again is “Failed States”
At any rate, this issue still is a BUG or defect, or whatever you want to call it with Plexamp despite the server upgrade. If anyone knows how to fix it, this would be greatly appreciated.
As Otto said previously, there’s a bit more to radios than just "shuffle everything labeled X".
Radios are smarter, and take into account a variety of other factors, including:
How popular a track is: it favours popular tracks, using popularity data from last.fm. A Man’s Not a Camel is Frenzal Rhomb’s most popular album, for example (and it’s a great album, at that).
How you’ve rated the track: it favours highly rated tracks
How recently you listened to something: it favours non-recent tracks
To be clear, Radio is NOT shuffle, so I’m not convinced this is a bug, more that it’s not behaving how you’re expecting it to. The resolved server bug was that radios were deterministic (identical list every time).
I believe the devs are working on a solution for your use case shortly (true shuffle of genres, not a radio). Until then, if you’d like a truer ‘shuffle’ for a genre, try creating a smart playlist in Plex Web, and shuffling that in Plexamp
