My music collection contains about 5000 tracks. My time travel radio contains three. My Library radio contains the same three. In the PC app the artist radio doesn’t work at all, just reporting “an error occurred loading items to play”, while over in Plexamp it half works (in that it’ll play stuff, but only from that specific artist and, as far as I can tell, the playlist never contains any other artists. Any track I play manually on any player works just fine but doesn’t make any difference to any of the radios.
Can anyone tell me what I’m supposed to do to get these to work?
Just wondering how is your ID3 metadata on your music files? Are all the lines filled in and correct? I only ask because mine seems to work fine but I spent a lot of hours making sure my files have all the correct metadata.
I don’t use Tidal, so that’s not an issue. I’ve just ticked the Last FM checkbox “Download popular track information” in the library’s edit-advanced window - is that the one you mean? I already see “similar” artists when I open an artist page - is that the same as “related” artists? I don’t see any options for either.
Having ticked the popular tracks option I’m still not seeing any difference. I assume PMS needs to download some data: is that done immediately or overnight?
I did a bit of searching and found some other threads mentioning premium music libraries. I’ve got a Plex Pass, but I see nothing in the existing library that confirms or denies that it is a premium library, and if I try to create a new library, that option does not appear. Is that likely to be part of the issue?
Yes, precisely.
Now this data needs to get downloaded. If your library is pretty big, you best leave that to the Plex Butler, which will refresh these data over the course of ~ 4 weeks at night. https://support.plex.tv/articles/201553286-scheduled-tasks/
enable ‘Refresh metadata periodically’
Yes, that’s the one.
Inspect the Plex XML info of a few tracks from different artists and albums.
Look out for the guid= attribute in there. If the content mentions ‘gracenote’ then you have a premium library.
But for the Radios this doesn’t really matter, because Popular Tracks and Similar Artists are loaded for both library types.
No Gracenote tag in the XML for any of the tracks I’ve checked. Whether or not it’s possible to convert an existing library to/from premium, it’s odd that I can’t create a new one. Nevermind, can’t miss what I’ve never (apparently) had.
Two nights gone now and the radios are still not working. I’ve got about 5000 tracks in my library, which doesn’t appear to be large by most reasonable measures, so how long is it likely to take the Butler to do its stuff?
Two week update: I manually refreshed metadata on ten or so artists, and those remain the only artists that the radios know about. I would have assumed that by now it would have updated itself with about half of my 200-plus artist collection, but it appears to be doing absolutely nothing on its own. I’ve just triggered a full metadata refresh to see if that will cause the remaining artists to start populating, but I have my suspicions that I’ll just have to bite the bullet and manually refresh everything. I feel sorry for anyone with a really large collection.
It would be nice if the menus on the radio had an option to just do whatever Plex needed to get the radios working correctly without further human intervention. Or if they just worked out of the box without needing us to do anything explicitly. Or if there was enough information in the documentation to tell us how to fix the problem in the first place without having to revert to forums.
Yes and theoretically yes. 24/7 operation, but the internet’s subject to the whims of a powerline network which occasionally drops any and all of its nodes. I’ve never tried to work out what the server’s internet uptime is, but I don’t think it actually loses the connection frequently enough or for long enough to be a real problem.
