I know.
There are a lot of “artist radios” out there.
But a year ago (or two?) Plex had this “plex mix” that was way better than anything I have ever seen. Or tried.
Normally, if you start with “Bruce Springsteen”, you will end up with John Mellencam somewhere. But with the Plex Mix, you could start with “Born in the USA”, and you would never end up with “The River”… If you see what I mean.
The songs were not just split in “genre” where Springsteen would be in “rock”, “Americana”, “blues” and “things your parents used to listen to” - EACH of his songs would be put in the category it belonged and tagged accordingly - and you would get other songs from other artists that fit THAT mood when you selected a certain song.
Taylor Swift would still fit “pop” and “country music”, but not with ALL songs…
I think Plex messed up, and broke up with whoever supplied the software for this AWSOME sorting - so it should be possible to find “who” and strike a deal.
Maybe.
(Sorry, not much into the technical jargon, I just know what worked. And selecting songs based on “mood” made me re-discover a lot of artists in my collection that I totally forgot until “that song” played. After which, I would stop the “mix” and select that specific artist and just enjoy my evening.)
They now have the new Sonic analysis that was recently released to Plex Pass members.
It took two weeks to analyse my 40k collection and crashes about once a day whenever I add new music but it is a work in progress.
So if I pick Piano man as a track I get these recommendations. Not sure if I totally agree, but it could become interesting
When I select “Sahara Hotnights”, classified as “Alternative rock”, “indie rock”, “garage rock revival”, “pop punk”, “pop/rock” and “rock” (not my tags )
Roon radio gives me "a lot of Swedish songs in Swedish… because “Sahara Hotnights is a Swedish band”… (and all of it picked from Tidal)
With the old Plex Mix, I would at least get a lot of “garage rock” or “punk rock”…
I love Roon. But it should be possible to “borrow” that old Plex functionality and/or algorithms and make Roon truly great…
Yes it’s a different idea of song based selection, more like Pandora.
I’m not much sure Plex is better at this point, just different. Hopefully it evolves and improves as Plex does.
Plex is not better any more. But it was better.
Then they switched to another “partner” or something.
They totally refused to talk about it. And claimed “nothing has changed” when the “Plex Mix feature” disappeared. 8-10 months later they came back with “but this new solution we are working on will give you the same. Sort of…”
And was not the same. The Plex Mix thing had a very deep analytical whateveryoucallit. So no matter what ARTIST you were listening to, the SONG was categorized correctly independent of that artist.
I love Roon - but they should be able to do something similar (and way better than current Plex solutions)
Currently my Plex scanner crashes almost every time I add music (which is several times a week). I quite like the Sonically similar feature, but not at the cost of having to restart the server 3 or 4 times a week.
The Plex approach of subjecting each music file to a very detailed audio analysis for this may be helpful for Plex at first to have audio material in the analysis at all. The only thing is that with 1000 customers, the same thing is analyzed over and over again. Spotify scans each file exactly once at the source, classifies it correctly with know-how from Echo Nest, Niland & Co and makes suitable packages for each customer group, mood…
Yes Uwe I think that they could reduce this workload by at least 90% for most people by using sharing the workload once it is well known from more than one source and their relationship with Tidal.
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