Discover new Music with LastFM

 

     

The functions of the current streaming providers for discovering new music unfortunately leave to be desired. In my experience, Spotify's algorithm used to be good, but has been changed for the worse. Apple Music does offer the option of listening to music by similar artists, but you can't save it as a playlist. Unfortunately, the integration of Tidal is not continued in Plex.

This is where this script comes in to make such a LastFM function usable for Apple Music. After entering an artist, comparable artists and their tracks or albums are searched for and made available in a file. This does not include artists that can already be found in the plex library. The text file can be read in with a shortcut under ios and a new playlist is generated in apple music.

Combine playlists

      

If you want to combine 2 or more existing playlists, you will not find a button specifically for that.
Instead you can start playing the first track of  playlist 1 and then select save queue as new items in playlist 2.

Alternatively, you could use a python script. Using python would allow you to combine more than just two playlists in one go. This could also be used to realize different sorting options, for example randomly mixing all tracks or sorting them by genre or last play date. An example is this script.

Unfortunately, the year of release of the track is not available as a sorting criterion because the Plex database lacks such a field at track level. If you want to sort in this way, either the original playlists must already be sorted by year or the only option is to export the playlists to an external music management program. There, the tracks can be sorted according to various criteria such as the year of release and the new playlist can be imported back into plex. I have already described how to do this in another article. 

Daylist - Playlists

     

Plex and plexamp already have a number of options for automatically creating playlists: Radios or sound journeys created based on certain criteria. 

The Meloday script, which can be found here, takes a time of day or mood-based approach. Meloday creates playlists for the respective time of day, be it morning, afternoon or late at night. It does this by using tracks that have already been played at those times, and adding tracks with sonic similarities to this framework. 

It even uses artificial intelligence, but not to generate the playlist itself, just to reformulate the names and descriptions of the new playlists.

There are many enthusiastic voices on reddit\/plexamp, even Elan Feingold, one of the founders of Plex, has commented positively - so it's worth giving it a try.