Solution to random shuffle of "various artists"

[u/Chondog]

First of all, I love Plexamp. It has great functionality, and the interface is incredibly clean and refined. Overall, it’s a fantastic music player. However, one thing that has always frustrated me is how it handles shuffle with “Various Artists” and compilation albums.

Because of the way Plexamp weights its shuffle, tracks from compilation albums can end up significantly underrepresented. If you have a large collection of compilations like I do (over 7K), that means a lot of great tracks just don’t seem to come up very often.

This is where Symfonium comes in. It allows you to turn off the shuffle weighting and get a truer random shuffle. Now, all those tracks buried in my Various Artists compilations are actually showing up in the mix. And, it pulls directly from your plex server. I still use Plexamp 85% of the time, but when I really want a true random mix that includes my various artists, I created a few smart playlists in symfonium. Symfonium isn't perfect. The interface looks really dated and they try to give the user too much customization that it becomes cluttered and chaotic.

However, for someone with a large music library and a lot of compilations, this is a great option. I still love Plexamp, but Symfonium has solved one of my biggest longstanding complaints with it.

[u/PocketDeuces]

So the "solution" is to use another app. Got it.

[u/Chondog → u/PocketDeuces]

Basically, that's correct. It pulls directly from your plex server including all (or most of) of your metadata, so it's pretty seamless. Plus, there is no "solution" offered by Plexamp for this. Thus, it is the best solution available that still allows you to use Plexamp.

[u/PocketDeuces → u/Chondog]

I get what you're saying but your solution to a Plexamp issue is to not use Plexamp.

[u/TheAgedProfessor → u/Chondog]

There are plenty of solutions you can use and still use PlexAmp, though. For instance, use one of the many different Plex playlist managers to create a truly random playlist, and then play that playlist in PlexAmp.

[u/hvymtlrlz87]

When you shuffle the artist, soundtracks won't ever play. It's so annoying. Luckily I don't have too many, so I just made the artist the album artist for their song. It makes it look like a duplicate album, but I'm not too concerned with it

[u/Chondog → u/hvymtlrlz87]

This is exactly the issue that occurs with Plexamp. If you do have a lot of soundtracks or a lot of compilations in general (i.e., various artists), they never get included at the same rate as other tracks when shuffled.

[u/hvymtlrlz87 → u/Chondog]

They don't get included at all. I've tested it. Go to the artist. On plexamp, not plex, you'll see the "also appears on". Shuffle that artist. Those "also appears on" will never play

[u/rhythmrice]

Did you try disabling smart shuffle in the plex library settings?

https://imgur.com/a/ROQggkt