HamRadio for Plex(Amp)

custom radios for plex music libraries

what?

this project creates custom playqueues of your plex music based on complex rules you can define. for example: "play a mix of songs I've heard and ones I haven't, preferring songs I haven't heard, and use sonic analysis to make sure each song flows into the next"

why?

I love Plex's Radios and Plexamp's Guest DJs, but I want more control. specifically I wanted to create the first example above - I wanted to shuffle tracks I've never heard into a queue of tracks I know I like, using sonic analysis data to make sure they flow well.

how?

(note: this guide is very rough right now; I'll take some time later to create a more in depth user guide).

0. Install dependencies however you like - I'm using Poetry, but you don't have to. The only external dependencies for HamRadio are python-plexapi and flask
1. Configure customradio: rename sample-config.toml to config.toml and fill in the values.
2. Configure a station: the sample stations.toml file in this repo demonstrates station config; you can tweak it or create your own.
3. Run poetry run flask --app webserver run --host=0.0.0.0
4. Make a HTTP GET request to http://[YOUR-SERVER-ADDRESS]?station=[STATION-NAME]

HamRadio will try to use the Plex Remote Control API to tell your client to start playing the radio it creates, but if it fails, it will instead return a deep link that, when opened, will launch PlexAmp and start playing the queue.

roadmap

this project is obviously extremely early in development, and there's a lot of work to be done. in no particular order:

• pass queue length, client address in request params
• additional code cleanup
• address various TODOs
• better UX when we can connect to the client remote control
• improve filtering and sorting: I'd like to add more operators to the Filter class, improve the Sort interface
• improve documentation, especially around station definitions
• add an option to create a playlist instead of a playqueue
• add deeplink options for plex as well as plexamp
• add validation of config files & error handling
• add type hinting
• tests

done!

• add an argument to specify which station to load: currently you can define as many stations as you want, but we'll only ever use the first one
• figure out if we can work around the plex remote control api, since it's a little unreliable, and doesn't work when you're not on LAN
• clean up & refactor code: everything is obviously in one giant file right now, which is not ideal, and I wrote it all in one night - so there's stuff to be cleaned up, commented, etc.
• add an abstraction layer on top of the Plex property names (ie. viewCount doesn't make much sense for music)
• improve filtering so that we don't play tracks from the same album back to back