Plexamp issue with Style Radio

Plex Labs
1

Hi.
I use “Style Radio” and choose “Italian Music Radio”.
What I noticed is that after some 20/25 songs, it starts repeating going through the same artist albums in almost the same sequence.
Here’s an example of what I took note of (only the artist name, but the album was always the same when repeating the artist):
Dirotta su Cuba
Alberto Fortis
PFM
Moltheni
Delta V
Franco Battiato
Audio 2
Carmen Consoli
Banco del mutuo soccorso
Samuele Bersani
Timoria
Elisa
Caparezza
Oliver Onions
Lucio Dalla
Saturnino
Subsonica
La Crus
Litfiba
883
Daniele Silvestri
Le Orme
Sergio Cammariere
Elio
Pino Daniele
PFM
Alberto Fortis
Dirotta su Cuba
Moltheni
Battiato
Delta V
Audio 2

I do have way more than only the above italian artists in my Plex collection and would like to listen to them as well, when coosing this “style radio”.
Is this a bug or a limitation of sorts?
TIA

2

The style radio is based on album styles, so it makes sense that you’re seeing the same albums show up.

Under the hood, with smart shuffle enabled, it’s trying to spread out repetitions across albums and artists, so sometimes that can feel like a bit of a pattern too. If you turned off smart shuffle, you’d instead find that sometimes it would play multiple tracks from the same album next to each other. The nature of randomness.

3

What is the “album style” when it comes to “Italian Music”? Is this a tag found in the audio files? Or is it something that Plexamp is retrieving in real-time from some online database?

4

I suspect it’s coming from our licensed Gracenote data.

5

Therefore I don’t have a chance to act on it? I.e. no chance to have my “Italian Music Radio” really pick from the Italian artists (instead of the “album style”)?

6

You can do that in many ways:

  • Manually adding them to a playlist.
  • Changing the genre and using a smart playlist.
  • Changing the country and using a smart playlist.
7

I don’t see the “genre” tag in my audio files - is this really part of FLAC/MP3 files?

Are you referring to the tag “Release Country”?

I’m using MusicBrainz Picard to put the information onto my audio files and there I can see following tags available:

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8

… in the meantime I tried the “smart playlist” feature and it works quite well.
But while testing it with the filter set to “Artist Country is Italy”, Alphabeat slipped into this playlist. This is wrong, as this band is from Denmark, and in fact Plex is showing this in the biography:

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Nevertheless, the tags show this:
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I’d like to understand where this information is taken from - apparently not from the files in my library?!

9

Artist data are coming from Musicbrainz and are occasionally augmented by last.fm and allmusic.com

Album data are also coming from these sources, but you can embed many meta tags to override them. Genre is one such tag which is embeddable.
Style and Mood on the other hand are not (at least they are not read by Plex).

10

So for my understanding:
where can I go looking to find out if the artist data contains the tag “Country = Italy”? I never filled that field out, so maybe it came from MusicBrainz?

11

I cannot say. Looking up the artist on Musicbrainz.org is certainly a good first step.

12

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