Setup worked?

[MickyGX]

How will I know that it's actually doing something?

I installed it yesterday afternoon, including connecting to Tautulli and Last.fm (but not lidarr). It's been dutifully recording all my music playing activity since then (at the moment, the dashboard says 88 plays). And by looking in Jobs, I can see that it's extracted my Plex track list, and metadata from Last.fm and stuff.

But so far, it's not offering any suggestions in any way. The Discover page has Because You Like, Manual Discovery, Queue, and Added For You all empty, as are the Playlists and Tracks lists on the Playlists tab. Also, Logs show no Warnings or Errors.

Is it waiting for some critical mass of data or something? I have a very large library, it's not that there's not enough for it to choose from.

[MickyGX]

Playlists tab (Tracks and Playlists empty)

The smart playlist sync requires you to have completed the user wizard (the per-user setup that runs the first time you log in as a Plex user, separate from the server wizard). It sets up your personal playlist in Plex and stores your Plex token. Without that, the smart playlist job silently skips your account. Go to /wizard while logged in as your Plex user and complete it if you haven't — the playlist should populate on the next 30-minute sync cycle, or you can trigger it manually from Settings → Jobs.

Discover — Because You Like (empty)

This is driven by your top 3 most-played artists in Curatorr, which are passed to Last.fm's similar-artist API. With 88 plays across a large library those plays may be spread thin — check your Dashboard to see if any artists are showing in the Top Artists panel there. If they are, the Because You Like panel should populate the next time you load the Discover page (it fetches live). If the top artists panel on the dashboard is also empty, the play data hasn't concentrated on any artist yet.

Discover — Manual Discovery (empty)

Manual Discovery requires Lidarr to be connected — it uses Lidarr's MusicBrainz lookup to search for artists. Without Lidarr configured, the search has nothing to query against. This is by design; it's not a Last.fm feature.

Suggested Artists (Artists page)

This is separate from Discover and works entirely from your local library. It should start showing suggestions once the Master Track Cache has run (visible in Jobs) and you have some play history. With 88 plays it may already have data — check the Artists page directly.

TL;DR checklist:

Complete the per-user wizard at /wizard → unlocks smart playlists

Keep listening — Because You Like needs plays concentrated on a few artists to seed Last.fm lookups

Manual Discovery needs Lidarr if you want it

Check the Artists page for library suggestions which work without Lidarr

Hopefully that helps but let me know if not and can look into it more

[MickyGX]

Complete the per-user wizard at /wizard → unlocks smart playlists

Did that yesterday, so I'm all set. I also went into my profile and added more Artists.

Keep listening — Because You Like needs plays concentrated on a few artists to seed

Well, of my top listed Artists, their play counts are 14, 8, 8, 8, 7

Manual Discovery needs Lidarr if you want it

OK, understood. I won't worry about that.

Check the Artists page for library suggestions which work without Lidarr

OK, I see those same Artists listed here that I saw on the Dashboard. But I don't see that I can do anything with that list.

Go to /wizard while logged in as your Plex user and complete it if you haven't — the playlist should populate on the next 30-minute sync cycle, or you can trigger it manually from Settings → Jobs.

I went back to the wizard and did it again. I was surprised that the genres I'd chosen previously weren't still checked (maybe you don't bother, because they're just for filtering the artists?), but I did that again. Then I went to Jobs and re-ran those. Still nothing showing up in Playlists or Discover.

Oddly, if I go to Logs, I can see "Wizarduser.playlist.synced Crescive + Curative playlists created for chris". Despite that message, nothing is listed. Also, in Plex itself, I don't see any new playlists.

check your Dashboard to see if any artists are showing in the Top Artists panel there. If they are, the Because You Like panel should populate the next time you load the Discover page (it fetches live).

No, this is definitely not happening.

With 88 plays [suggested artists] may already have data — check the Artists page directly.

Yeah, I see a whole list of artists there. But it's just echoing back the list of what artists I've played in the past day, sorted by number of plays. It has added any element of discovery at all, it's just echoing.

[MickyGX]

Those play counts should be enough. Can you check two things:
Has a playlist appeared in Plex at all, even if empty? (Look for one named after your Curatorr user)
On the Logs tab, change the level filter to Info — the smart playlist sync and discovery jobs log what they're doing at that level, and it'll show exactly where things are stalling.
Also, when you completed the user wizard, were you logged into Curatorr with your Plex account (not a local account)? And on the Jobs tab, does Smart Playlist Sync show as enabled with a recent last-run time?
Edit: 1 other thing to try is to run the user wizard again at /wizard/user and go through all the steps

[CWuestefeld]

I think it's working now. Here's what I think was going on:

What I never did, previously, was to explicitly log into Curatorr via Plex. I logged in with the registration I created when I first brought up the app (where I complained that the password fields don't work in Firefox), and I provided my Plex Token. I know that Plex will let you do basically anything, given the Token (I've got my own project that infers tag ratings, and I do this extensively). And I could see that Curatorr was correctly seeing all my activity on Plex; it just wasn't doing anything with it.

So I went back and logged into Curatorr via Plex. That walked me through the wizard (yet again), and following that, I've now got playlists.

Suggestion: my experience suggests that the initially-created admin role is only useful for administration, and not actually using the app for curation. I suggest that when the user is logged in as that identity, that all those panels in the UI that want to be showing suggestions that would be intended for a Plex-related identity should be suppressed, and replaced with an annotation saying something about "functionality only enabled for Plex users".

[MickyGX]

Glad you are finally sorted. And yeah, you aren't the first to have issues so it needs a rethink so appreciate the suggestion. I am going to change the setup wizard to:

Create Admin > Fill in Plex Local URL (no token needed) > Login to Plex (auto populates token) > Run User Wizard (optional can be done at a later stage). And leave lidarr, tautulli etc to be filled in if required.

And yeah will add that note for logged in admin curatorr account

[MickyGX]

This is now completed. Wizard updated, added a note for when you are logged in as user and also fixed password field in firefox