The top of my Genre Radio list in Plexamp looks like this:
But the beginning of my Album Genres list looks like this. You can see there are many Album Genres listed which do not appear in the Genre Radio list.
Why does this discrepancy exist?
My music library does have “prefer local metadata” turned on, in part because I am particular about tagging genres my way. (Though, it is a neverending chore…)
i think it’s probably a matter of genres vs styles. styles is a much richer superset of genres, as least available via metadata.
So Genre Radio is only available when the genre (or Style?) has metadata that can be looked up?
genre radio shows your “manual” genres if you have that setting (not prefer local content, the genres setting in the same area). otherwise it uses styles.
OK, now I get it, thanks.
Checking my settings… OK interesting, I do have it set to get genres from tags already.
Is it only showing genres that have a number of albums over a certain threshold?
ah yup, that too.
A minimum number of albums/tracks requirement makes perfect sense but maybe it is too strict currently.
Here is an example. My Coldwave genre collection is about 60 albums. About 1/3 of those albums are singles or EPs – so, they have few tracks compared to a full album – but those 60 Coldwave albums contain a total of 301 tracks. That seems like it should be enough for a radio station.
Anyway the bottom line is, one thing I really want from Plexamp is to tell it, “just play some [genre name]” because that is how I like to explore music I haven’t heard in a long time. Due to the nature of Genre Radio that isn’t always possible. I realize we want Genre Radio to be of high quality, but I would rather be allowed to begin a Genre Radio station even if it’s destined to be of poor quality.
If it’s possible to assess the quality of a Genre Radio station based on the number of tracks and/or track metadata, maybe the album limit can be dropped? A quality label can then let us know what we are in for.
There are advanced/hidden preferences you can tweak:
RadioDirectoryThreshold (default: 15)RadioDirectoryLimit (default: 50)Neat, thanks!
Edit to add: I changed RadioDirectoryLimit to 250, since I have ~ 240 genres. Nearly all of them now appear in the Genre Radio list. Not sure what value is too high, but nothing blew up yet.
For the missing genres, I am not sure where the cutoff is because I don’t understand RadioDirectoryThreshold. It isn’t in the hidden var docs though I assume it’s a requirement for the number of albums needed to qualify a station. Anyway, the less well populated genres that I cared most about do seem to have shown up, so tweaking RadioDirectoryLimit was a big help. Thanks @elan!
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