First of all, I’m a real newbie to Jellyfin, but I am hooked! I absolutely love the instant mix feature of the Music Library. It seems to work by selecting songs tagged with the same genre. Unfortunately, I’ve got my albums tagged at a pretty granular level; e.g. instead of just reggae, I distinguish classical roots reggae from contemporary reggae from ska; from jump steady, etc. I was wishing I could create more diversity in a mix to select from multiple genres somehow. Well, I’m here to report it can be done!
I use Mp3Tag as my primary tagging program. IMHO, it’s the best batch tagging app out there. I have tried it this technique in the (MusicBrainz) Picard tagger, which I use in my workflow as a preliminary source of tags, so I assume it should work in any decent tagging program.
In the genre tag field, just add multiple genres separated by semi-colons. So in my example above, I just add ‘Reggae’ as a second (or third, etc.) genre in the tag. When the metadata is added (or refreshed) in Jellyfin, the albums and songs will show the multiple genres. Watch out, though! A forward slash (/) will also be interpreted as a separator, so the genre ‘Pop/Rock’ will come out as two separate genres, Pop and Rock in Jellyfin. Now, creating an instant mix from an album or song with multiple genres will pull songs into the mix that match any of the genres! You can get some surprising mixes this way!
This also works great by going to the genre tab in the music library, selecting a ‘parent’ genre (e.g. Reggae) and selecting an album for a mix or even just shuffling!
I should add that I tried the obvious solution: Editing Jellyfin metadata at the album or even the song level allows adding multiple genres. However, I couldn’t get albums with a genre added in Jellyfin to get picked by an instant mix with the same genre originally included in the tag. Also, AFAIK changes in Jellyfin won’t flow back to the source. I have an extensive music library that is already (meticulously) tagged, and I will continue to do my tagging outside of Jellyfin.
Back to tagging!