With track radio, do playlists "drift" as they continue? And why are some playlists shorter than others?

Plex Labs
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I’m very curious about how Plexamp chooses music with the track radio feature.

Are all of the tracks it picks chosen because they’re similar to the first track, or does the radio station “drift” over time and it starts choosing music that’s similar to the tracks its recently played?

Also, sometimes when I make a radio station, it only picks a handful of tracks from my library, when others go on for dozens and dozens of tracks. Do the shorter radio stations run out of similar tracks? Or is that possibly a bug?

2 Likes
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For track radio it picks a large of set of tracks “close” to the initial track and then organizes/orders based on a number of criteria, so there’s no drifting per se.

Yeah, it can be that some tracks don’t have enough close music.

Good incentive to make your library larger! Also, if you have Super Sonic libraries shared with you, track radio can pull from them as well.

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Thanks for the explanation! Interesting that I would perceive drift as I listen to a playlist. Not every playlist has done that, though, and it’s probably more to do with the chance ordering of the tracks.

Do you think in the future you might add a more power usery version of this? I’m imagining something that lets you specify which analyzed qualities to use for finding similar tracks, ranges of similarities, things like that. Granted the sonic analysis data may be too abstract for a human to do much of anything intuitive with it, but if I could I would love to play around with something like that.

(Maybe it’s possibly for third party apps and tools to fill that void in?)

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It’s possible, but as you say, it may be too abstract.

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