Helpful answer only please (ie please don’t tell me to just ‘get bigger library’)
Random Album Radio (RAR) is probably my main way of using Plexamp, I loved it the first 2-3 times I used it, but it quickly became apparent that it is just as repetitive as the other radios. It frequently queues up two albums by the same artist back to back, and I don’t think I’ve ever had it go more than ten albums (I’m actually being very generous here) without repeating an artist. For some artists it seems to have 1-3 “favourite” albums and will always choose those, no matter many albums I have by that artist.
Part of the reason I prefer RAR to other radios is because, in my experience, Plexamp favours live tracks/albums so heavily and I generally don’t like to hear live tracks outside of their album context. But actually, I’d prefer if it just didn’t favour live albums/tracks so much!
Bit more about my library:
I don’t use Tidal, just my own library. Everything is recognised and accurately matched and I don’t have any unofficial bootlegs or anything like that. Everything has been sonically analysed. I wouldn’t consider any of my music to be particularly niche or obscure - perhaps not always super popular, but still very much within a broad definition of mainstream, I would think. My library is currently very modest ( 130 artists, not counting compilations, with an avg. of 4.7 albums/artist), as I am still very much in the process of rebuilding and expanding it since finally getting jack of music streaming services (I lost the majority of my owned music many years ago through carelessness). But I feel like my library should still be big enough that Plexamp doesn’t need to be so repetitive.
IMO, during a single session, no album should ever get repeated (including if I skipped it) as long as there are more albums in my library, and there should always be a minimum of around five albums before repeating an artist. But it seems like Plexamp is just so obsessed with “popularity”(1) that it will prefer to repeat albums in a session rather than play something less “popular”.
(1)or whatever it is that causes this behaviour. Personally I have zero need for any kind of popularity bias when listening to my own music collection - I wouldn’t have bought it if I didn’t like it, at least at some point in my life - and it’s probably my most hated feature of Plexamp.
As an aside - having a collapsed album view for the queue while listening to RAR would be such a big improvement - let me easily see the next few albums coming up so I can more readily skip all the repeats (and albums I am not in the mood for right now)!
So, nothing I can do then? - not that I expected an instant barrage of replies, but thought someone from the Plexamp team might have some tips or an explanation…
Have I been wrong in assuming that RAR is “smart” like the other radios? If it’s actually just straight up random, then I will assume that any patterns I’ve perceived are in my imagination. But my question still stands, how can I improve it? Or is the only solution to increase the size of my library (which I can only do slowly because $$)?
I don’t want to turn on ‘smart shuffle’ because it includes the popularity metric, which as I already stated I really dislike.
EDIT: I just realised it’s a long weekend (here anyway) I am so sorry if I seem impatient. Hope the team is getting break
Random album radio has no biases, if you’re talking about the top level one on the home screen. It’s truly random. It sounds like you are looking for some thing which is less random in terms of spreading out albums by the same artist. It doesn’t have favorite albums, or bias for popularity.
There is also zero bias for live albums/tracks anywhere in the system.
There is bias on smart shuffle (if you have it enabled) and things like library radio and the style/decade radios which use the smart shuffle heuristics behind the scenes. There’s bias for popular tracks, highly rated tracks and less recently listened tracks.
Like you said, its a weekend, so a bit of patience is appreciated.
Thanks Elan, I truly do appreciate the reply. And I am sorry for acting impatient. I rarely post anywhere because it makes me incredibly anxious, it’s generally a last resort after I’ve done a lot of searching for an answer first. So after going through with actually posting I was just anxious to get the reply and then having to write a reply back, done with
I do mean the top level option. I thought that anything with radio in the name was being ‘smart’, while if I want a regular, ‘dumb’ shuffle, well I can just shuffle something (genre, artist, etc).
It is helpful to know that random album radio is actually just random, and any patterns are presumably imagined.
I didn’t think there was an explicit bias for live stuff - but I do wonder if, for some artists in my library other factors (like popularity) are creating an implicit bias simply due to a live album or track being popular - or maybe because live albums often contain a lot of an artist’s popular tracks.
In my experience, the whole ‘prefer less recently played tracks’ has never really seemed to work though - I’m talking about if I do other radio modes such as style, mood, deep cuts, time travel - those are the main ones I use apart from random albums radio. Other biases just seem to have more impact. But I’ll have to start keeping better track, because I am almost certainly seeing at least some patterns that aren’t really there - which as I understand it, is why some companies started making shuffle less random!
I keep the smart shuffle option disabled because I want to keep an option for non-radio shuffling, without any biases. I would love to be able to use radios, album or otherwise, with some smart features that don’t include popularity. I don’t use ratings either, but that’s a personal preference, I just don’t care to rate anything, and that’s unlikely to change. I do understand though that I am probably limiting Plexamp somewhat by not having any ratings. Still for me, the most important factors for radio are a bias against recently played and perhaps a bias towards recently added and/or new releases.
Thanks again, for your time. Unless you think that enabling smart shuffle would help my random album radio be less random (avoiding repeating artists, preferring albums I haven’t listened to recently), I guess the answer is that there isn’t really anything I can do - other than growing my library more to reduce the chance of repeats.
There is a possible improvement to be made to this, by making it less random in a specific way, specifically “spreading out” albums from the same artist to an extent. We have the ability already to do a “dithered shuffle” which is used in smart shuffle (e.g. it makes shuffling a single artist work better to avoid clumping tracks on the same album).
Anyway, some food for thought.
Edit: And just to clarify, smart shuffle doesn’t do anything to a Random Album Radio.
I just ran some analysis on a few consecutive Random Album Radios in my own library:
Radio: Generated random album mode with 152 ms into 5937 albums, 71232 tracks (5 consecutive).
Radio: Generated random album mode with 199 ms into 5937 albums, 71232 tracks (2 consecutive).
Radio: Generated random album mode with 150 ms into 5937 albums, 71232 tracks (3 consecutive).
So at least for me, there aren’t many albums which are consecutively from the same artist. I do have a larger library than you do, and this analysis doesn’t account for ABAB sort of repetitions.
And with a small change, the results are now dithered.
Radio: Generated random album mode with 181 ms into 5937 albums, 71232 tracks (0 consecutive).
Radio: Generated random album mode with 165 ms into 5937 albums, 71232 tracks (0 consecutive).
Radio: Generated random album mode with 181 ms into 5937 albums, 71232 tracks (0 consecutive).
So not only does it not have any consecutive, entire list should be better spread out in terms of artist.
It’ll take a version or two to make it into the server code, but it’s coming.
Thanks for doing that! I’m sure that having a much larger library would definitely help since obviously the chance of consecutive plays would be reduced (well, a higher artist count - I guess adding more albums/artist without a compensatory artist count increase would have the opposite effect). I was mainly prompted to ask about this when my most recent random album radio session queued up two albums from the same artist almost immediately, and it was an artist I only have three albums for so it really stood out. It seems less egregious when it happens to be an artist with a lot of albums.
Sorry, I went to bed immediately after my last post.
wow, thank you so much. this was not at all what I expected - my post wasn’t a feature request, just looking for some tips on improving my experience.
I look forward to future versions
(ie please don’t tell me to just ‘get bigger library’)
) and you were kind.
