Plexamp: Stop "Library Radio" from playing so much Christmas music?

Plex Labs
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Maybe it’s just me, but the “Library Radio” plays an absurd amount of Christmas music. Less than 0.2% of my library is Christmas music, but it seems to try playing one of those few tracks every ~20 or so. This happens across multiple days, multiple computers, and multiple times restarting the “Library Radio” (after having played some other “radio” or album)

I would love a way to blacklist some genres from the radio.

Plex Server: 1.12.1.4885 (plexpass)
Plexamp: 1.0.4
Music Library:

  • Tracks: 47238
  • Christmas tracks: 138
2 Likes
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That sounds wrong, and there are a few reasons why it might be:

  • Your christmas music has ratings data from Last.FM and much of your other music is missing it.
  • There’s some bug in randomness (unlikely, but possible).
  • You’re seeing patterns where there are none (e.g. the Birthday Paradox) :sweat_smile: -

You can’t blacklist genres at the moment, but any tracks rated 1 or 2 stars will not be included. A bit heavy-handed, but at least possible.

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(We could also decide to just manually blacklist a few genres for this reason…)

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None of the albums are showing any star ratings. Are last.fm ratings in hidden metadata?

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@paulnicorn said:
None of the albums are showing any star ratings. Are last.fm ratings in hidden metadata?

These are ratings which you yourself would apply.

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@elan said: […]

  • Your christmas music has ratings data from Last.FM and much of your other music is missing it. […]

Question: Does Plex automatically download and add the ratings from Last.fm if you’re using it as an agent? Or this the checkbox for “popular track information”? How can you disable that for random mode to not “taint” the true randomness? (without unchecking said box, because I may find that information interesting in a different context)

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@solitaryreign said:
Question: Does Plex automatically download and add the ratings from Last.fm if you’re using it as an agent? Or this the checkbox for “popular track information”?

Yes to both (same thing).

How can you disable that for random mode to not “taint” the true randomness? (without unchecking said box, because I may find that information interesting in a different context)

If you want truly random, just shuffle your entire library (or in Plexamp, add a smart playlist for “All Music” and then shuffle that :sweat_smile:

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This is still a pretty big issue with the “Library Radio” in Plexamp for me. Would to be able to blacklist genres.

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@paulnicorn said:
This is still a pretty big issue with the “Library Radio” in Plexamp for me. Would to be able to blacklist genres.

This has been an issue with pretty much every player I’ve ever used that can generate a playlist for me. I love my Christmas music, but after mid-January and before the end of November I have zero interest in hearing anything from that genre.

Does anybody have any workarounds that they’ve successfully used to temporarily suppress their Christmas songs? Do people just create a separate whole identity/library to house ONLY those items? It seems all the players want to let you play your whole library but, who does that?

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Does anybody have any workarounds that they’ve successfully used to temporarily suppress their Christmas songs? Do people just create a separate whole identity/library to house ONLY those items? It seems all the players want to let you play your whole library but, who does that?

I have a separate Plex library that only contains Christmas music.

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Just wanted to toss my 2 cents in to support some way to filter genre out of the library radio. I only just started using Plexamp a couple days ago, and absolutely LOVE library radio!! But, I get a Christmas song every 10 or so at least. I have a similar very small % of Christmas songs, and I know random is random … but a genre suppression would be perfect if you can find a good way to represent in the UI. Maybe to start with a json config with an array of genres to suppress since that would be quicker to implement vs. waiting for UI? I don’t think it makes sense to be specific to Christmas, since this would solve some of the other feature requests I’ve been reading about especially for folks with a huge range of options in their library.

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I’m now so glad that I have not added our Christmas music to our library yet! :wink: I have to add on to other’s comments here, in that recently discovering PlexAmp and especially the ‘Library Radio’ feature, has me listening to so much of my old music collection that I hadn’t realized that I missed so much!

Any chance you guys can selectively rate the Christmas album tracks all as 1 star. Sounds like that would remove it from the “radio” rotation. And then either create a separate playlist for the Christmas stuff, or remember to “un-rate” them all come next Christmas time.

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We’ll look into the possibility of doing some genre blacklisting, that might be workable.

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This has gotten worse lately. I’ve rated all Christmas music as 1-star, but they still come up quite often in Library Radio.

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The actual tracks need to be marked as 1-star, just to be clear, in case you’ve rated the artists or albums.

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I’ve marked all of the tracks with 1-star and this is still happening.

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I don’t have an explanation for that, I just verified over here that library radio does filter out low-rated tracks (specifically, tracks a rating less than 5.0 out of 10.0, which would be 2.5 :star:s

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Hello,
what is the current state?

Is it possible to blacklist genres now?

Or maybe set a global ignore like:
Don’t play if ($Folder of playing song CONTAINS “xmas”) AND ($DATE > january AND < december)
?

Or maybe ignore all files which have id3v2-tag like “only-play-on-xmas”

Or anything else, which users of Plex can add as an additional condition to the Library Radio?

Thank you.