In my opinion - this is a gripe with every music streaming service available, however I believe PlexAmp is built in a way to easily accommodate this (providing I’m not the only one who wishes this was a thing).
Feature Request: Radio Setting → Christmas music suppression
In settings for Radio, have an option that allows a user to choose between:
Always allow Christmas music to be included in the Radio feature (this is the default)
Never allow Christmas music to be included in the Radio feature
Allow the user to choose a “Start Date” and “End Date” in which Christmas music is included in the Radio feature.
This would be a big feature for me… as I hate getting “Jingle Bells” in June
It’s a good suggestion, and one better done on the server since it generates the stations.
We’ve pondered the best way to do this over the past couple years and haven’t had any great ideas beyond perhaps designating a specific genre e.g. as “No Radio” and allowing people to mark albums or tracks as such.
Elan,
What if you were to allow a station to have a drop-down box that would have checkboxes allowing you to selct the genres that you want included in the station? I have a similiar issue in that I love listining to my library radio, but y co workers have politely asked me to play less heavy metal. If I could create a station that would allow me to decide what genres to include, I’d readly spend 15 minutes checking all the genres in a drop down list.
Thanks for listening. I’ve loved Plex since I started using it nearly seven years ago.
Rather than a Plex specific genre that no one would normally apply, use common genres such as “Christmas” or “Holiday.” Of course, this still won’t work until Plex actually uses the genre tags in tracks. Currently, the whole album would be skipped, even if only one track contains that genre, because all genres are applied to the album.
Just implement a generic ‘genre blacklist’ for ‘radios’ and anything similarly generated by algo.
Along with christmas/holiday, I’d like to avoid ‘live’ or ‘bootleg’ or ‘djmix’ recordings, along with any podcasts/audiobooks/spokenword and similar content that might be in a library from randomly showing up in a radio.
i agree with @TeknoJunky… would be awkward if a sex skit plays like “ummm” from silkk the shocker, or “F*** me” from Notorious B.I.G… there are others. hasn’t happened yet though.
i’m not sure library radio algo would play these though.
I would also like this feature. Would it be possible to add a separate tag to the server called Holiday? Or maybe Seasonal? Then choose what tracks or albums you want included in this and then Set a date range for having the tracks included in the radio? Or a date range when you only want that music to be in the radio?
Real life radio stations play music this way, we all know around Nov no matter what station Holiday music starts then stops around Jan. And come summer all the summer songs play.
Maybe set a time frame for certain music to be included in the library and not.
Music to me is either summer music, winter music, fall music, and Winter/Holiday music.
Maybe allow a user to specify a seasonal type of music by calendar date which between the dates certain music you’ve chosen shuffles more or less in the radio?
Does that make sense? I hope I explained well enough.
Ratings only work if you enable them. The unfortunate issue with ratings is that if you use them then mixes tend to play the same songs over and over rather than giving true random access to songs on an album that I would prefer.
Have you considered adding an option to not include specific tracks, albums, or artists that the user can select individually to create a blacklist?
Using genres as suggested here might make sense if the library is tagged properly, but if it’s not, or if the tags coming from the online databases aren’t perfect, you aren’t gonna get good results. Managing a custom genre could be cumbersome in a large library and you’d lose the information if you have to recreate it. But why not simply have a blacklist of tracks, albums, and artists that you don’t want to appear randomly? That should be easy to manage, flexible enough, and could potentially even be saved across library recreations. It could even support date ranges to limit seasonal music, and the randomizer simply has to check against this list.
I agree… if this problem was easy to solve… then it wouldn’t be an issue with every single music streaming service out there. We are all just hoping Plex can find a solution before the rest :). Thank you for all you do!
Well, naturally the mechanism would need to be built, I didn’t mean to imply that it would be just a matter of flipping a switch^^ I don’t know the internals of Plex of course, but I thought I read somewhere that mixes and radios are generated on the server… am I remembering that wrong? If not, it’s not a matter of adding it to clients, but only to the server, isn’t it?
During generation all you’d need to do is compare the potential titles to the information on the blacklist, which could even be just a pre-defined playlist that you shove everything on that you don’t want to hear randomly. Given the right setup, it should be a relatively simply matter from a programming standpoint.
If they aren’t generated on the server, but on the clients, I could totally understand how you really don’t feel like adding it to all those clients you have at this point though. Assuming that the code couldn’t be shared. The feature isn’t that vital after all.
Sorry if I seemed pushy, as a programmer I just think “this should be easy… wonder how their system works, seeing how it presents a problem”^^
Just because nobody does it, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s difficult to do though. It’s a relatively obscure feature, and developers will usually have more important things to work on.
What about putting all your holiday/Christmas music in a separate Library? Just pull up the holiday library when you want that. Again not perfect, I’d prefer to have my music together.
I had this idea of having holiday music on some sort of timer. Only play during certain months. Obviously you would have to have your library organized right to make it know what holiday music is. Maybe it’s own folder that is only allowed in a particular month.
