Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions on how to create a playlist of songs from my library that have been released as “singles” or “Top 40s” across a time period?

Let’s say I wanted to throw a 90s party, and I wanted to create a playlist from my library using only songs that people are likely to know. I recognize that’s totally subjective, so maybe that’s why I’m struggling to find what I want. I can create a playlist based on album release date, which gets me a bit of the way there, but the playlist is going to include a lot of “deep cut” tracks and whole albums that few people know. I’d rather not spend too long curating the list. I was hoping for a way to just find popular tracks, and it seems like basing it on “chart toppers” would be a good place to start. Ideally, it would be genre-independent, but limited to songs that got decent radio play, so Backstreet Boys to Korn to Shania Twain are fine. Yo Yo Ma maybe not so much.

It doesn’t seem like Plex has information available in the filters to achieve that. It does have “Popularity” as an additional column header if I list my music by “Tracks”, so I guess I could sort by that and limit the results to some value. It feels a little clunky, though, and I’m not sure where it’s getting that information.

I know that Library Radio is a thing, but I can’t seem to make it do what I want. I only have 4 stations on the web interface: “Library Radio”, “Deep Cuts Radio”, “Time Travel Radio”, and “Random Album Radio”. Clicking on them just starts playing music from a wide selection that I have no control over. I know that “Decade Radio” exists, but it doesn’t seem to be giving me what I want, either. It frequently pulls instrumental tracks from movie soundtracks. I have “Smart Shuffle” enabled on my server. I’m not sure if that’s helping or hurting my experience (I’ve seen some very mixed reviews on that feature). I also can’t find “Decade Radio” on the web interface; it seems like Decade Radio is only available on Plexamp.

I’d rather just create a playlist. That way it would be available everywhere, and I could tailor it a little bit, if needed.

So, yeah… any tips? It seems like the “filter by decade, sort by popularity, and limit by count” might be my best option right now.

  • oxjox@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    12 days ago

    Interesting question. You can filter by decade and genre and album critic rating but not by popularity of a song. However, if just go to an artist page, it will show you the top / most popular songs by that artist. So, it would seem the data (however accurate) exists somewhere. You could add a Track Rating filter which is something you would have to manually add for each song. That would add the work of having to go into each artist and rank their top songs - dumb.

    I’m seeing an option under Settings > Agents > Albums > Last.FM that says “Download popular track information”. Not sure what that does.

    I would post this over on the plex.tv forum and see if the devs can give you feedback or put it on their request channel. https://forums.plex.tv/c/general-discussions/plex-features/

    I’ve done something similar to what you’re doing but I’ve invested countless hours doing it. I’ve used Spotify to start and to refresh my memory about what was popular. I then used SongShift to export that playlist to a CSV that I could work from on my desktop. Once I have a few songs in the playlist, I’ll use Plexmp’s “Related” option to review other songs that might be relevant. Lots of work but it’s a 12 hour playlist that doesn’t quit.

    Similarly, I’ve posted on the forum about how crappy the playlist intelligence is. I did not get a satisfying response https://forums.plex.tv/t/why-doesn-t-stations-guest-dj-ever-make-sense-and-is-there-anything-i-can-do-to-make-it-better/849228