Dear team,
I have selected 18 artists of my collection and triggered a Play Mix.
Only 2 or 3 of them are played, one artists being played very often.
While in this artists selection screen each time I run Play Mix , it’s always the same 2 or 3 artists that are selected, with always the same “preferred” one.
What did I do wrong?
Kind regards.
you’re hitting the play button (artist shuffle) rather than multi-artist radio?
the artists which are by default recommended on that screen are your most played artists for the last 30 days; if something is playing, it’ll use that as an influence as well.
Images may tell more than my Frenglish. As you can see, Depeche Mode tracks are occupying the full space.
I think it is due to the number of selected artists as I could not recreate the issue with a handful artists, but I could recreate the issue with the same number of artists on two different IOS devices (different model, different OS version) running the latest Plexamp code:
Image 1 = Mix Builder - Artists selected
Image 2 = Play queue resulting from the “Play Mix” action
Kind regards
Not quite 
But they are probably occupying proportional space to the number of DM tracks you have vs other artists in there?
(We are working on some improvements to shuffling, but in general, the overall mix of artists depends on how much of each you have.)
But perhaps I’m mistaken and you don’t have proportionally more DM in there?
… “Most” of the full space I should have written 
I did count the number of albums of each artists I selected (I understand it does not indicates the number of tracks per selected artists, but it gives an idea) and here are the top 8:
The Rolling Stones = 28
Depeche Mode = 26
The Cure = 26
U2 = 18
Sting = 17
Peter Gabriel = 14
Dire Straits = 8
Pet Shop Boys = 7
It is then possible that DM have more tracks than any other, you guessed it well, but why don’t we have more Rolling Stones v.s OMD for which I only have 3 albums? I would expect a better mix considering the other significant artists, don’t you think? But maybe this is what you are working on, a better shuffling.
Kind regards.
Just wanted to chip in real fast that I have seen the same thing the few times I’ve used the mix builder.
I picked a lot of artists, but literally 95 percent in the play queue came from only one of the artists. The artist did not even have much more albums than the rest.
All the artists I picked had popular tracks populated.
hard to say what happened without a log. it’s possible e.g. you listened to other artists recently so those were deprioritized.
Keeping this topic open as 3.4.1 behaves the same: the Build Mix does not shuffle enough IMHO.
Selected the same set of artists, in the same order. Out of the 18 first tracks, DM appears 11 times, OMD appears 2 times, Pet Shop Boys appears 4 times and Peter Gabriel 1.
That said, Plexamp makes my day every single day
this is not something the client would have an effect over.
however, this is something which a server update could make a large difference in, I believe the fix is coming in the next release.
here’s my queue from Artist Mixing Peter Gabriel (8 albums) and Pet Shop Boys (12 albums). As you can see, it’s pretty well “shuffled”.
Got you thanks, can’t wait for this improvement.
Shuffle is not really good for me, or my Plex server is seriously in love with DM.
I selected DM (26 albums) and The Rolling Stones (28 albums), then played the mix:
Side note: I started to use the Mix Builder as I was looking for a way to play a given artists mixed with related artists automatically, but the artist radio does not play the selected artist itself enough or at all, so I leveraged the Mix builder to select my favorite artist and add the related artists myself manually. Did I miss a way of doing this differently letting Plex(amp) doing the job?
PlexAmp does play the selected artist every ~10 tracks. Remember, if you feel the artist radio is playing too much varied music you can either use the the AutoPlay card “related artists”. This is not the same as artist radio. It only takes the closest related artists. Or you can go into settings and select another separation degree for the artist radio.
This would be similar to what you are doing manually in the mix builder.
Thanks.
I went from Unlimited to Two Degrees of separation for the Radio settings
I selected Dire Straits artist
I started Dire Straits Artist Radio
The first 10 tracks didn’t include any of Dire Straits
I jumped to the last track of the first set so next tracks’ selection is triggered, still no Dire Straits tracks in the second set
I did the above action several times, still no Dire Straits, but after several jumps to try to catch a Dire Straits in the play queue, the generated tracks’ list was made of the same artist with no more mix.
Maybe “jumping” is not the way to demonstrate that I don’t see the initially selected artist in the generated play queue ?
should be a fine way, possibly all your Dire Straits tracks were played too recently?
server logs might show more.
that doesn’t make a lot of sense, unless you’ve played DM a lot recently. server logs right after playing might show what’s going on.
In response to Radio issue, here is the log, interesting indeed.
(Started Dire Straits radio at 10:05:10)
Kind regards
Plex Media Server Logs_2021-01-21_10-06-13.zip (111.2 KB)
Here is the log. By jumping after the initial long suite of DM tracks, I could find a better balance between DM and Rolling Stones tracks. Maybe my expectations of a better balance from the beginning is wrong. That said, when DM is part of a longer list of artists selected in the Mix, their presence is too much 
Kind regards.
Plex Media Server Logs_2021-01-21_10-26-36.zip (176.8 KB)
(Please turn off verbose debugging for future logs, debug is good enough.)
This log might provide some clues.
Radio: Split shuffle into buono/brutto/cattivo of 20/593/2.
The smart shuffle algorithm uses a few heuristics to split tracks up into 3 groups; it’s possible that DM tracks dominated that first region because:
You could consider disabling smart shuffle on the server side, but this sort of pathological behavior is generally an indication that something else is up.
Also note interesting logs here:
Jan 21, 2021 10:05:10.319 [0x7f125b159700] DEBUG - Radio: Skipping a 'Dire Straits' track because the user listened to it recently.
Jan 21, 2021 10:05:10.319 [0x7f125b159700] DEBUG - Radio: Skipping a 'Dire Straits' track because the user listened to it recently.
Jan 21, 2021 10:05:10.319 [0x7f125b159700] DEBUG - Radio: Skipping a 'Dire Straits' track because the user listened to it recently.
Jan 21, 2021 10:05:10.319 [0x7f125b159700] DEBUG - Radio: Skipping a 'Dire Straits' track because the user listened to it recently.
Jan 21, 2021 10:05:10.319 [0x7f125b159700] DEBUG - Radio: Computed 0 candidate tracks for Dire Straits.
Jan 21, 2021 10:05:10.547 [0x7f125b159700] DEBUG - Radio: Found 13 similar artists for 'Dire Straits' at 1 separation degree(s).
Jan 21, 2021 10:05:10.556 [0x7f125b159700] DEBUG - Radio: Adding similar artist 'David Gilmour'.
Jan 21, 2021 10:05:10.556 [0x7f125b159700] DEBUG - Radio: Computed 0 candidate tracks for David Gilmour.
Jan 21, 2021 10:05:10.556 [0x7f125b159700] DEBUG - Radio: Adding similar artist 'Eagles'.
Jan 21, 2021 10:05:10.557 [0x7f125b159700] DEBUG - Radio: Computed 0 candidate tracks for Eagles.
Jan 21, 2021 10:05:10.557 [0x7f125b159700] DEBUG - Radio: Adding similar artist 'Sting'.
Jan 21, 2021 10:05:10.561 [0x7f125b159700] DEBUG - Radio: Computed 0 candidate tracks for Sting.
Jan 21, 2021 10:05:10.561 [0x7f125b159700] DEBUG - Radio: Adding similar artist 'Eric Clapton'.
Jan 21, 2021 10:05:10.561 [0x7f125b159700] DEBUG - Radio: Computed 0 candidate tracks for Eric Clapton.
Jan 21, 2021 10:05:10.561 [0x7f125b159700] DEBUG - Radio: Adding similar artist 'Mark Knopfler'.
Jan 21, 2021 10:05:10.594 [0x7f125b159700] DEBUG - Radio: Computed 0 candidate tracks for Mark Knopfler.
Jan 21, 2021 10:05:10.594 [0x7f125b159700] DEBUG - Radio: Adding similar artist 'The Police'.
Jan 21, 2021 10:05:10.596 [0x7f125b159700] DEBUG - Radio: Computed 0 candidate tracks for The Police.
Jan 21, 2021 10:05:10.596 [0x7f125b159700] DEBUG - Radio: Adding similar artist 'Santana'.
Jan 21, 2021 10:05:10.597 [0x7f125b159700] DEBUG - Radio: Computed 0 candidate tracks for Santana.
If it wasn’t able to compute any candidate tracks for an artist, it means that either:
Make sure that you have track popularity enabled for the library, and just for good measure, to a Refresh All Metadata and see if it helps at all.
Popular tracks was checked against the music library, I did a Refresh All Metadata, I now find the tracks selected for the radio much more balanced. Starting a Dire Straits radio begins with one Dire Straits track, then many different artists’ tracks i.e. same related artist does not re-appear multiple times in a short selection, and Dire Straits tracks are played too.
Thanks for that! I enjoy the Radio more than ever
Check also this new release ~ Plex Media Server which has a cool enhancement to shuffle to “spread” artists/albums out better.
