Track genres have arrived. But now?

    

                

I would always recommend Plex as a music server in combination with the Plexamp app. 

However, there are some weaknesses. One of them is that it doesn't read the genre tags of the tracks at track level, but only at album level. This means that you cannot distinguish between the piano-accompanied ballad and the dance track on the same album.

Nor can you filter out the occasional Christmas song on an album or, conversely, elegantly add it to a Christmas playlist. 

As a workaround, however, you can use the mood tags, which can be edited at track level and are available for search functions.

If you don't want to do this track by track, the question arises as to whether you can quickly bulk tag the tracks to be tagged with a mood.

Is it christmas? How can I quickly tag many tracks with "christmas"?

You can do this by creating a playlist in the plex web app, for example with all tracks that have the word 'christmas' in the album or track name. You can then use a python script to tag all tracks in the playlist with the mood tag 'Christmas' (as a replacement for the missing genre tag). You can use this script, for example. 

In its latest version, plex recognizes track genres. However, at the moment they can't be edited in the interface. You can edit them in software like mp3tag and refresh the album though. Finally, editing is possible in plex web. Click on the stylo of the track and go to tags. If you don't have genres there, you are either on an older version of plex web or on a local version which has not been updated. 

Where are the track genres to be seen?

You can use the track genres as filters for say, a playlist which excludes some genres like Christmas or Classical Music. Go to library, tracks and you are able to list all tracks who have a particular genre or create playlists and collections using them as filters. 

However, you cannot see the filters in the album view. As a workaround, you can use python code to see and also to modify the genres. Here's some quick and dirty code which offers the missing album view.

Create your own Radio: Here's how:

   

                

Plexamp is a wonderful companion app to listen to music in your plex library. You can create artist's radios, album mixes, or track radios.

But once you've worked up an appetite, you'll want more: 

You can't create radios in plex web, the sonic proximity to the source tracks can't be determined and you can't combine two tracks or two artists. You also can't rule out the possibility of tracks heard in the last few weeks reappearing, etc. 

But wait, all this can be achieved with a python script.

An example can be found with 'Plex TraxRadio' on my github pages. The script stores in a plex playlist some tracks of the artist the source track comes from and adds sonically similar tracks of a certain distance. I also remove possible duplicates and take into account the rating of the tracks. In the published version, no tracks with a bad rating are included, but unrated tracks are. 

Have no fear...

It should be said again that I am not a professional coder, quite the opposite. Most of it was created in interaction with ChatGPT...

The possibilities with python are almost endless. For example, you could also take into account the genre(s) and much more.... 

.