Sonic Similarity and Various Artists

Plex Labs
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I have a bunch of Now That’s What I Call Music albums that are all pretty similar pop music, but they aren’t showing up as Sonically Similar Albums or Similar Tracks in Plexamp. I experimented a little and I think I understand what is going on…

I have an Album called Now That’s What I Call Music 85 tagged with the Album Artist “Various Artists.” When I look at the Sonically Similar Albums, I see one album:

  • Halcyon by Ellie Goulding

When I look at the first song on the album (Album Artist: Various Artists, Artist: Taylor Swift, Track: Anti-hero), I see 4 Similar Tracks, none of which are from any of the other Now That’s What I call Music albums.

It looks like showing sonically similar tracks and albums excludes anything by the same Album Artist. I don’t see any tracks from these Various Artists albums being sonically similar to any other track from any other Various Artists album.

I tested my assumption here by copying all the tracks from this album into a new album and renaming the Album Artist tag to “Various Artists (test)” so it’s different. After sonic analysis had completed, I looked at the Sonically Similar Albums and found 30 similar albums (Halcyon as noted above and 29 of the other Now That’s What I Call Music albums). When I look for Similar Tracks for the first song (as above), I find 21 tracks: the 4 from before and 17 more from other
Now… albums. This tells me a couple things:

  1. This album has sonic data, since it’s showing something for similar albums/tracks
  2. This album matches other albums sonically, but for some reason Plexamp is not showing them

It looks like the Sonically Similar albums and Similar Tracks feature in Plexamp is excluding any albums/tracks from the same album artist. I can see why that would make sense in the usual case, you could end up just seeing songs from the same artist. But in the case of Various Artists, I don’t think it makes sense. It’s more likely that two tracks tagged with Album Artist “Various Artists” are not actually the same artist. Since most of my pop music comes from Various Artists albums, I can’t use the Sonic features in Plexamp to do anything useful when I want to listen to that genre.

Would it be possible to special case Various Artists so that Plex shows sonically similar albums and tracks from other Various Artists albums?

If not, are there any workarounds to make the sonic features usable for this use case?

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Now That’s What I Call An Interesting Scenario… sorry, in all seriousness… A similar use case (which I don’t use but have read on this forum) is where users will group all their Christmas or Holiday music under the same ‘Album Artist’ tag such as ‘Christmas’ or ‘Holiday’. This allows them to request play of just their Christmas music during that time of year with the option to have a structured system where they can temporarily save/restore their Christmas music folder so it is only in their collection at the appropriate time of year. So the same sonically similar issue occurs on that as well. It is a general use case beyond the specific use of ‘Various Artists’. So it seems to me if Plexamp were to address this, they would need to provide some type of ‘Album Artist’ exception list setting to allow inclusion of the same ‘Album Artist’ in sonically similar list processing.

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Agreed, we’ve made a couple changes over here, required some server work and some Plexamp work.

1 Like
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Awesome, Thank You! If there is anything you’d like me to test, just let me know.

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