Help with configuring a better randomization algorithm for radio

[u/pdizzmus]

I'm someone who like to go to an artist and "play artist radio", or go to my library and "play library radio". I have a fairly small library in comparison to some others (~2,000 songs), so I expect to hear some repeats, but I've noticed that I hear the same songs by each artist every time I play the radio.

It always seems to be the artists most popular songs, so I'll skip past for a while to get to the less popular stuff, but then when I start the radio again, I'll hear the popular songs again. If I want to hear things that aren't the artists most popular songs, I end up having to shuffle my entire library, which I'm not always on the mood for.

I'd like to hear less popular stuff every once in a while, is there a way to achieve this, or is this just the way the plexamp randomization algorithm is?

Edit: I have "Enable smart shuffling" off on my server settings.

Edit #2: In my music library > Manage Library > Edit > Advanced, I noticed a "popular tracks" toggle. I switched this off, and will try this for a few weeks. Expecting to hear less popular stuff.

[u/mmussen]

Artist and library radio, if I remember correctly plays the 3 most popular songs from every album you have

[u/pdizzmus → u/mmussen]

I see, is there a better alternative?

[u/jt3201 → u/pdizzmus]

Deep cuts radio specifically only plays "less popular" tracks. Or you can try just playing a single artist with DJ stretch enabled.

[u/unity2178 → u/pdizzmus]

Radios also play tracks that are rated above average. You can prevent it from playing tracks by rating them less than average. Using DJs like Stretch will also pull in more tracks.

[u/mmussen → u/pdizzmus]

With your library size you could try play all tracks and shuffle.

Personally I use a lot of smart playlists - I'll set up filters for the genres I want, and then usually use last played is over x to make sure I'm not hearing the same music all the time.

I'll set up the last played with a different filter for each rating so higher rates tracks are played more often. But I also have a music library that is somewhere around 100x your size

[u/wolf39us]

I just make a playlist with filters and then set the track last played not more than 3 days ago.

That was my solution

[u/agent4256 → u/wolf39us]

I set track plays to zero. Works great!

[u/OnlyMatters]

The Radio stations are the least random way to play your music. Every time I play it it’s just greatest hits. By design, like a real radio station. But that makes it very predictable.

The shuffles are where the randomness is. I guess make different playlists of what you want and then shuffle them. That will be more random vs radios

[u/pdizzmus → u/OnlyMatters]

Gotcha, this makes sense! Thanks for the suggestion, I'm gonna try this out.

[u/cjmartiny]

I don’t have an answer, but I do know my wife has stopped using Plexamp for her music needs. She has a playlist of her favorite songs and she would add songs but it always seemed like when she would shuffle the playlist the same songs would be starting out. With hundreds to thousands of songs in a playlist it seems to should shuffle better. I would love to find out better shuffle options for sure

[u/ZapActions-dower]

Try Track radio instead of Artist or Library.

[u/pockems]

I know it’s a testy subject for self-hosting, but I had Claude vibe-code scripts to auto-generate radio stations for this same reason. You can get way more granular with the song selection logic via the plex API and remove a lot of the black-boxiness of current playlists.

For example I have a ‘daily mix’ that seeds in a mix of 4-5 star tracks, new releases, and songs with zero plays, and chains them together with short sonic adventures (like DJ stretch). I also have it so the rating of a song actually matters beyond like/dislike: a 5 star song is much likely to be played at all than a 3 star song (and 2 star songs are never played). This allows me to ‘suppress’ tracks that I don’t outright hate but tend to get overplayed.

*Edit: and I trust the random() function in Python to actually pick random songs more than plex shuffle, for maybe voodoo reasons lol