Plexamp Problem - Sonic and Christmas

Plex Labs
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Okay @elan knowing you are passionate about Plexamp (and I’m definitely becoming so as well, and my wife and my kids) I’ve got a good one for your Plexamp team to solve.

As our music library grows, so does our list of Christmas albums. Now, Christmas music is nice around Christmas time but not during the rest of the year. This is where the problem comes in:

Plexamp’s Sonic (DJ, Stations, Related, etc.) keeps adding Christmas music to our Sonic listening sessions. We were just listening to ABBA’s latest album and then DJ Stretch added an Amy Grant Christmas track. Fine this month, but not when it is April.

Can Plexamp Sonic be programmed to ignore “Christmas” tagged tracks/albums unless the original track/album is Christmas tagged?

Honestly, this is becoming a bigger problem than just Plexamp; it impacts Plex’s standard players too. It isn’t enjoyable to select the artist Frank Sinatra for shuffle listening and have Frankie’s own Christmas music popping in while in the month of July.

I’ve considered created an entirely separate Library of music just for Christmas albums, but that feels more like a hack than a true solution. I’ve already resorted to creating non-Christmas Collections of certain artists but it is a pain. Seems to me that Plex and Plexamp could just flag Christmas (and maybe Holiday) tags as being optional in the artist shuffles and Sonic playlists.

Anyway, I hope you take this into consideration. As we continue to focus on building our Plex music library, we are falling deeper in love with Plexamp and appreciate your passion for it too. Sonic Adventures are truly awesome! “Hey kids, call out two songs!” Now we have a playlist for our 30 minutes of travels. :sunglasses:

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While it seems like a hack, it’s probably the most ideal solution. Understandably, I see your reasoning to just compile literally everything into one main Music Library but the nuance is far too great to wait for Elan and their team to hammer what could be an easy fix. As we all know, nothing in the Plex Universe is ever so easy.

While I too have suggested my fair share of possible solutions, I still remain firm on keeping the holiday albums separate. They still are accessible for everyone, just that they’d have to switch in and out of each music library to view and play them, which is fine.

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we chatted a while back about allowing some sort of labeling which would exclude stuff from radio stations. you could add all the Christmas music and everything else along those lines to that label. however, it seemed like it would be just as much work to do that as separate it into a separate library, and generally i want it either listen to ALL christmas music (when my wife forces me to) or all not christmas music (the rest of the year), so that seems like a fairly strong argument for separate library…

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The nice thing about using the tags is that your music is tagged automatically. Separating the libraries requires a bit more work. A user now has to manage two separate folder structures, search across two libraries and manually switch libraries. Yes, first-world problems, but I think we all usually love our technology for the automation it provides.

I agree too that I saw the answer would be a way to allow the users to control the labels to be included but that is already something we do all the time in our Smart Advanced Filters so the coding is pretty much already there in Plex (not sure about Plexamp).

I also see that Plexamp Sonic is already identifying Christmas songs; it automatically creates a Christmas Radio Station in Style Radio.

Thinking about this more, does this mean that users will need to create multiple libraries for all types of music they what excluded from Sonic? I really don’t think that is the solution you are trying to create. Plexamp is about providing the music you want the way you want. Users shouldn’t have to create folder structures that define playlists, moods, styles, etc.

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Sonic analysis in Plex has nothing to do with styles.
Styles are applied by fetching them from allmusic.com

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I think it could be solved by a check box in album/track details to exclude the album/track from sonic playlists. I too have been annoyed by Xmas music showing up in sonic. Also, sonic will play long extended mix sets (dance music) instead of keeping to individual tracks (that’s why I ask for the flag on tracks as well as albums).

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Thanks for the clarification, I thought I had read Sonic handles shuffles and radio station mixes.

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I honestly didn’t post this thread hoping to pressure Plex into a solution. I just wanted to share what I thought would make Plexamp better, and it appears others agree this would be a welcomed addition. I know Elan is a huge music fan from his posts and videos and I figured that Elan must have come across this issue in his listening as well. So, I thought I’d lend a voice from the customers as to a feature that would help make Plexamp even better.

Again, I’m loving Sonic and Plexamp. Sonic is giving me new ways of approaching and experiencing my music.

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Is it possible to add exclusions to library folders? My ./Christmas is a subfolder of ./Music.

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Via .plexignore files, I would assume yes [but not per library].

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I assume .plexignore ignores the media files completely (Plex will not display them at all) and not just for Sonic Analysis, correct?

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Correct.

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I have tried this also. Be aware, plexignore files are hidden files, well at least on mac they are not sure on windows. Just a tip for you, put a text document with the file name of “plexignore file in this directory”. CAn’t tell you how many times I forgot I had a plexignore file in the folder and was scratching my head trying to figure out what was going on and why certain things werent in the library…

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I’ve kind of “solved” a similar issue by rating the tracks I don’t want in radios with 1 star. I can still play them from playlists I’ve made myself and when I play albums, but they don’t really show up in radios.

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Well, I have moved all my Christmas albums to another folder and thus Plex Library, as recommended. It sucks to put it bluntly. And, that is not just moving all 164 albums, which took some time. This is not a decent solution for an application that is supposed to help you organize your media collections.

Trying to educate my family as to how to access the new Library in Plexamp already proves my point: "Go to Settings (already clumsy…find the gear, oh you don’t see it because…) → Source → and change the source…and yes, you have to do this each time you want to access the other library. Oh, and you need to unpin that new Christmas library on every Plex app device (loved telling my friends about that one and I’m still not sure how to handle having that library hanging out for the entire year.)

Next, I instantly found a bug in Plexamp where “Collections” do not show up when selecting my new Christmas source, yet for some reason my Playlists from the standard Music library are still showing up. What a mess.

So, is this really the way forward @elan ?

Do I next need to separate out my young children albums or my opera from my classical, etc. into separate libraries? What is the purpose of these Tags again?

Also, music usage is much different than Movies. With Movies you are looking for a specific title that you will be watching for the next couple hours. Most likely you are looking for a specific title, but you might rely on genres to browse for a title. With TV you will be bing watching or you have two series you are currently switching between and watching together for a few days. Music is a different beast.

With Music you are not usually wanting to play one track and probably no even one album. You are wanting to create a playlist of tracks to fit your current moment in time and Sonic is supposed to help you do that dynamically. Want soothing classical for your drive home, or want your list of modern rock for Friday night? Want to entertain your kids on the drive to school or do you want a relaxing dinner party background? And yes, it might be a Christmas dinner party.

Sonic needs to allow you to filter and that filtering is best done with artist, album and track tagging.

It is obvious other Plex users have running into this same issue with their music collections.

Sorry, I love Plexamp, but this recommended workaround has definitely exposed an ugly underbelly. It really doesn’t need to be this way, does it?

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I have similar situation and feelings on this. Another option which I have tried which is easier than explaining to my kids and family is. AFTER I separated my Christmas music from the “Main” library, what I would do is I would in the background around November first, would edit the Main library and add folders, and select the path that the Christmas music was in, and basically add it into the library and then delete the path at end of first week in January or whenever someone would say, “why is there Christmas Music”.

Some side effects of doing it this way, is that you lose play count and stars and collections and playlists, but not always. Ive noticed some odd behavior here. I think it depends on if the server has been updated or not, or library updates etc… I am not sure. But family always says, oh its nice to see that you added all this christmas music just in time for christmas. So it creates some excitement.

This is a very difficult thing to conquer for programmers and for users.

Just for discussion sake and some brainstorming. I am sure a solution can be found. Maybe I’m being naive here, but I would think there is a database out there of Christmas songs, or songs that are considered to be “holiday” music songs. Couldn’t that be a text file that lives somewhere in the server and if your library has those songs the server would then check the system date, if the date is between November and February or a user specified date range, the server will play those songs more frequently or it will auto create a playlist called “seasonal playlist” and drop it on the home tab? Once outside that date range, the server will not play those songs. Like a holding zone for music.

This might be an elegant solution to the problem. Or maybe something like instead of the Plex team having to updated and maintain a list of holiday songs cause that could get annoying and difficult to do, how bout a calendar selector where you can choose a start date and end date for when you would like certain music to be played? You could do that either per track or even how bout at the collection of playlist level. Create a playlist/collection and that playlist has a date range, any songs in that playlist, will be played during the specified dates and will not be played outside that range?

Instead of it be a playlist or collection maybe call it something else. Like “Seasonal”. Or maybe even call it “Timed”. I don’t know. The point, if possible, another kind of playlist/collection function that allows for Date ranges. User selects date range of the seasonal playlist and if songs are in that playlist the server will skip over them during library shuffle etc… until the date range comes up.

Kind of like how you can silence notifications on your computer between certain hours.

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We would like to make switching between libraries easier in the future. Sorry I don’t have much else to offer at the moment.

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Showing my new and first Unraid server (which is dedicated to Plex and Plexamp) last night to my friends.

I told them about the sophisticated Sonic Analysis and the new DJ features.

In a good mood I started a track with Joy Division and let DJ Gemini doing his job.
The fun was about 11 tracks long, then apparently the DJ smoked or drank too much.

Christmas track started.

@elan, do I really need to tell my friends I have to add some plexignore files?
Or I have to move the Christmas tracks to a separate Library?
Or use other workarounds? Please consider a decent solution, which can’t be too hard to implement when albums and tracks are decent tagged.

To quote @Kilgry Kilgry: this sucks.

Second point: I can’t match Joy Division to The Beach Boys singing a Christmas song in about 11 tracks.

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I love Library Radio when I’m in an anything goes mood. The conundrum however of what to do with Christmas Music, Kids Music etc does somewhat break an otherwise cool feature (Library Radio). Perhaps the addition of the ability to add filters to Library Radio solves the problem. The filters are easy to tweak for seasonal favorites and things like Kids music can be filtered entirely and left to individual playlists when it is desired. @elan ?

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The best solution would be if Plex actually stored genre information for tracks. That way a simple, all inclusive playlist could be created using filters to not include genres such as Christmas, Holiday, Kids, Children, etc

It seems that Plex Music was designed more for “album” listening, There are a few of us who rarely listen to albums, but prefer a random selection from our libraries, be it Library Radio, or by genre.

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