I have been playing with Plexamp for a couple of days and really like it. I particularly enjoy radio creation functionality. However, I have noticed that the radio stations almost completely ignore albums where the album artist is “various artists”.
My library has about 13000 tracks in it and about 3500 (about 25%) of those are on various artist albums such as soundtracks, and complications (think Time-Life AM Gold albums). I noticed while listing to various mood radios that songs on those discs almost never came up.
To test this I tried using the “gentle” radio stations since that tag appears often on the “AM Gold” compilation albums (I am assuming plex amp uses the album mood tags since it frequently uses tracks without mood tagging). Ove 200 tracks while it would list songs from a similar era I did not get a single track from any “AM Gold” album. I tried again using style under the soft rock, and bubble gum tags, and got the same results of about 150 tracks. Finally, I tried the decade radio, and could not get a single song for those albums to show despite them making up a disproportionate section of my 60’s and 70’s era library.
In that testing, I also very rarely saw any over various artist albums at all (5-6 tracks total).
Am I doing something wrong? Do I not understand how the tagging works or is used? OR is this just a bug in the system?
this boils down to (1) did it match to a TiVo album and (2) did that album have moods. you can check this by looking for it on allmusic.com, which uses the same metadata we do.
Continuing to use the “AM GOLD” example, the 1966 edition (titled: “AM Gold: 1966”) uses a number of mood tags including Amiable/Good-Natured. In my library, there are 344 albums (with 5236 tracks) have that tag, of that 101 albums (with 2203 tracks) have “Various Artists” listed as the album artist. In about 100 tracks in Amiable/Good-Natured mood radio, none of them was an album where “Various Artist” albums. That seems unusual even for a list generated at random.
After a month of usage, its seems to be the case, that anecdotally, albums with Various Artist extremely infrequently under any circumstance. It makes me wonder if, there is some artist associated tagging that a names album artist such as Wu-Tang Clan would have, but Various Artists would not.
If that is the case (or even similar to the case) can albums with “Various Artists” as the album artist, simply use the track artist instead and just ignore the album artist?
I also notice this limited random songs PlexAmp generating when using Listen Radio station When you have a large collection no good hearing the a limited number or same songs. Not sure how the algorithms are done, but it would be great to have a feature where all library path as selected and songs randomised everything
Plex really needs to take a look at a better way for dealing with VAs in the library overall. It is not ideal how the library treats Various Artist as an actual artist.
Look at the recently played music category for example.
It was just an example of some of the issues with the current implementation of Various artists and compilations.
Plexamp is in general a lot better, but it still feels like it has to work around the limitations of the Plex music library.
The VA album I listened to today on my way to work on my phone show up under history, but not under recent plays, for example.
Have the same issues with Various Artist(s) being treated as an artist. It makes it irrelevant what actual artists are on the compilations. Various Artist albums come up regularly on full library shuffle but never on Artist Radio. Missing out on hearing a large chunk of my library on Artist Radio stations
Very happy to hear this is on the radar. I hope you open up for user feedback early in the process to make sure nothing is forgotten considering how complex this have to be to work properly.
