It would be great to have the option to exclude Compilations and Live albums from the Time Travel Radio.
Time Travel Radio takes the date from the album. As a result a compilation album released decades after the original release of the track on an album is played out of its era. In fact it can be played years after the artist died!
For example of a live album - Queen - Live at the Rainbow ‘74 was released in 2014. Time Travel Radio therefore plays it as a 2014 album and yet the recording is from 1974 - a difference of 50 years.
If there was an option to exclude Compilations and Live albums then Time Travel Radio would be chronologically correct.
I agree with the Live thing; in terms of compilations, we’re hoping to use track dates instead of album dates, so a compilation album could contribute a track into the right year.
If Plex has an accurate way to start grabbing track dates that would be a huge upgrade. It has always been frustrating to have 50s songs show up in a 2000s decade radio because of a 50s compilation released in 2011.
This is somewhat tangential, but I believe we need a general way to exclude multiple kinds of tracks from multiple contexts.
For example, some albums have interviews or skits scattered among the music tracks. I am probably not the only person who may want to turn on a music playlist and never hear a jarring switch to an interview in the middle of my Time Travel Radio midnight smooth jams. I also never, ever want to hear holiday music.
And, I also generally want to skip live tracks unless I am choosing to play a specific live concert front to back.
Today, all I can do is remove these files from the library, which blows holes in the collection and prevents me from choosing to listen to a rarely chosen track.
I would love to see something like a list of genres I could set, and whenever Plexamp gets to a track with a banned genre in any kind of playlist, it simply skips it. You’d have to do the work to tag your tracks, but that’s fine with me.
IMHO a trait that is inherent to the file, like the track genre tag, is better.
People who carefully tag their tracks will already have track genres like Interview, Holiday, Skit, etc. You’d set the filtered genres once and be cruisin’.
But, if the data is something inherent to the Plex GUI, then we’ll have to double-enter the data.
If you do go that route, I think it’s really important to give us a fast way to add that label to large groups of tracks. Like, if we can make a playlist with all of our banned genres and tell Plex “apply Label X to everything in that playlist,” that isn’t so bad – but it’s also work that needs to be redone when you add to your library, whereas a genre filter works automatically after first time setup.
Maybe implementing both is reasonable, then all kinds of users are happy.
