Since I cannot get any support in a coherent manner, I am throwing this topic in here. Plexamp has, for months now, played the same tracks, in the same order, 98 times out of 100 whenever I play an artist radio. I have a vast library of music, this was not always occurring when I first got Plexamp, but now, if I play an artist radio, I will get one fixed tracklist, every single time. Very, very rarely the artist radio will play another sort of pre-determined tracklist, I still don’t think they are random at all, but usually it is the same songs, in the same order, every single time, defeating the purpose of Plexamp artist radios (I can make my own fixed playlists). I’ve sought help on this before, contacted some Plex employee thru reddit, sent logs, never heard anything. I have no idea if this is the right forum, I don’t think I should have to spend 45 minutes getting familiar with a site just to seek support for a product for which I pay (lifeling plexpass or w/e owner, regretting that today).
Lmk if you can offer any support, if anyone knows what can be done to actually get random tracks to play thru an artist radio on plexamp.
I originally thought…“wow…what a great way to avoid playlists”. I “thought” that the radio function looked at say genre and top 5-10 songs for other “related” groups in same genre. That doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact, in addition to exact same songs playing as mentioned, I find tracks from other radio options popping up on what I would qualify as “incorrect” genre that keep coming up no matter what group I select.
Is there someone that can post on the mechanics behind the radio option and if there is fine tuning that can be done to truly randomize and stick to appropriate genre?
It sounds like you’re hitting up against a bug in older versions of the Plex server that resulted in deterministic shuffling. If you’re on a version before 1.20.2, make sure you update and give that a shot.
Additionally, I should point out that Radios are not supposed to be “true random”, as they’re guided by a set of parameters. For more detail, see my answer here:
that might also help answer your question about the mechanics of radio @goldbond1.
For shuffling a genre, try going to the Library tab (the second one), find the genre you want, and use the ... button to shuffle the whole genre.
Keep in mind, too, that if you’re seeing “genres” in Plex, rather than “styles”, it means you’ve got the Prefer local metadata setting enabled in the library. In this case, Plex’s understanding of your library genres are entirely dependent on how well tagged your music files are, and radios will suffer from these sorts of issues unless you’re super diligent with your tagging!
tl;dr: Make sure you’re running the latest server, check that you’ve got track popularity data enabled in the library settings, and check that your music is tagged and matched correctly.
If you’re on a version before 1.20.2, make sure you update and give that a shot.
I confirmed I am on 1.20.3, and it appears Plexamp radios are back to working again. Playing the same artist radio will no longer play the exact same set of songs in the exact same order each and every time.
Sorry for the delay as been swamped. I am on the latest Windows version and keep my Plex up to date regularly. I did notice that radio seems to be working “better”. But, haven’t had the opportunity to play extensively. I am that they may not have shuffle. However, I would hope the genre remain based on group categorization. Metallica doesn’t quite blend with 80’s New Wave as an example.
I wil check out the other suggested options. I can’t seem to find them on Plexamp for Android. Just need the time to research. Thanks.
that might also help answer your question about the mechanics of radio 
