Possible? Playlist of 100 random unplayed songs

In iTunes I’m able to make a smart playlist that is “100 random songs that haven’t been played”. Or “50 random songs that were last played over a year ago”. (Basically, I’m trying to rediscover my music.)

Is there anyway to do this in Plex? The best I can do is to get some songs, but it just starts alphabetically, so I get the first chunk of my library, not a random selection.

TIA.

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Yes, with ‘custom filters’.
You can make this filter then into a smart playlist (indicated with red in the screenshot).

Thanks. I’ve done this but still only end up with almost whole albums, not a random collection. My filter is “Track Last Played… in not the last… 1 year”, and limited to 100 items. But I end up with 100 songs from the first artists (alphabetically) of my library. Any trick to get a random collection of artists?

(additionally: one reason I want to have a limited number of items is so I can sync it for offline use. Maybe that is the biggest difference from what your screenshot suggests.)

Plex considers the sorting applied when you created the playlist. So if you view your songs by album artist or album title, there’ll be whole albums in your playlist. You can apply some different order, but from what I can see there’s no true randomizer

But you can sure play the playlist shuffled. Every Plex client I know has a shuffle button for playlists.

true… but the selection will alway be based on the 1st 100 items based on album title / album artist / bitrate / playback count / date added / …

@tom80H said:
true… but the selection will alway be based on the 1st 100 items based on album title / album artist / bitrate / playback count / date added / …

Then don’t restrict the number of items. It doesn’t make sense anyway to do that. Play with the other parameters or add another filter condition.

I agree… it appears @tfjunk has a different use case in mind

Again thank you all for your help.

I think part of my issue is getting my head thinking the “plex way”, vs iTunes or other systems. For instance, I still find it strange that you don’t make playlists in the Playlist view. In iTunes you make a playlist and fill it with songs. Plex you collect all the songs you want, and then you save the playlist.

Summing up what I’ve done (thanks to suggestions above) that helped with my situation:

  1. I realized that Plex generally assumes you have streaming access to the server. Maybe this isn’t 100% true, but if you create a playlist with all your songs according a filter, you can then use the Sync settings (say on iOS) to limit the amount downloaded. So I created the playlist as-if I can stream, and then limited to via sync settings.

[@OttoKerner It is the need to have the playlist offline that was the reason to limit to 100 items. It make sense that I don’t want to fill my phone with 1000s of songs.]

  1. I didn’t realized that the shuffle settings were honored with creating a playlist. So what I did (hope this was correct) is create a filter to find the ALL unplayed songs, then clicked shuffle (which started it playing) and then saved the Queue as a playlist. I don’ know if this will update (according to my filters) when I add new music to my collection, but seems to have the affect that I wanted right now: A mixed list of unplayed songs that I can limit when I sync to my phone.

Is the solution in #2 the right solution?

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Understood, if you want to sync the songs then you’ll have to limit the item count.

You did it the only possible way. Unfortunately, when you save a play queue as a playlist, it is no longer a ‘smart’ playlist. So it won’t auto-update.