Hi @recursiver,
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.
