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. 

How can I sort the albums in a plex music library in all artist views by regular albums, live albums and compilations in just a few minutes?

 

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Some time ago I mentioned in a post the possibility of choosing between normal albums, live albums, compilations and singles/EPs in the artist view of plex. This is possible because plex can read the RELEASETYPE tag of the audio file. The whole thing looks quite nice, but that is not all. In the plex library, album view, you can filter according to type, e.g. Compilations, Live Albums, Remixes and so forth and also according to format, e.g. album, single, EP. Plexamp, of course, can look at that as well when creating a playlist. 

Those who prefer the differentiating view are faced with the problem that albums already read by plex often have no corresponding tags. This can be done manually with an editor, e.g. mp3tag, but you have to be very careful that you enter the tags exactly as required (e.g. "album;compilation" for a compilation) plex is very picky. Then you also have to refresh the album. This takes a while, first the album disappears from the row of normal albums, then it is sorted correctly with a little delay when you refresh the view. 

However, you can also automate the process using a python script. The python script asks for the name of the album, changes or adds the 'releasetype' tag in the metadata of mp3, flac and mp4 files and finally refreshes the album in plex so that it is regrouped as a live album, compilation or single/EP. The python script is available here. 

Grouping albums by type - how it works... Is it good for anything?

 On the artist page, plex can group regular albums of the artist and in seperate lists, live albums, compilations, EPs and Singles and so forth. You can enable that in settings, under library. 

Admittedly, that looks nice on the artist page but...
... is that all? I haven't found a way in plex itself to use that grouping for filtering any results and the searchbar doesn't look at the album type either. So you would have to add a mood tag like "live" to the album to use that for filtering.   No: Filtering is possible in the album view under format (Album, Single, EP) or type (Compilation, Live, Remix etc.)

Plexamp also can use either the „album formats“ album, single or eps or the album types live, compilation, soundtracks or mixes for filtering and creating playlists. Hence you can use those playlists for further refinement.

So if you are interested in album formats or types, here is how it works:

When scanning the file, Plex uses the MusicBrainz tag "Release Type" for sorting. If you want to do that manually, you can use mp3tag and add a field "RELEASETYPE" to the file's metadata. For live recordings, enter the value "album;live", for compilations "album;compilation". Make sure that the field and the values are EXACTLY spelled like this, otherwise plex would not recognize the tag. 

Plex takes some time for processing, the album poster even vanishes for some time from the artist page. 

NEW: In a newer post, I linked a python script to automate the procedure.