PLEX actually has smart playlists but the interface for creating them isn’t very intuitive and the filters you can have aren’t robust.
Here’s how to create a ratings based playlist:
- Go to your music library.
- Switch to the Track view (as opposed to Artists or Albums).
- Click New Filter
- Click Rating
- Click 5 Stars and 4 Stars. You should see the listing filter down to 4- and 5-star rated tracks.
- Click the Add to Playlist icon on the left sidebar.
- Name the playlist.
- Now go to your server’s Playlists section. You will see the playlist with a gear icon on it; that gear indicates that it’s a smart playlist. If you rate any other track in that music library with 4 or 5 stars, the track will automatically be added to that playlist.
So Smart Playlists exist and technically work, but you notice that there’s not a lot of filtering options. For Tracks, you can only filter by Rating and Collection. Switch to Albums and you get different options (Genre, Year, etc.), and Artist has its own as well. But you can’t mix and match these filters; if you filter albums, you add the whole album to the playlist.
Plex would really benefit from a total overhaul of the Smart Playlist feature. I use Smart Playlists all the time for video content (I set up “channels” for TV shows, like “Sitcoms” or “Action Shows”), but I still feel like more robust filtering options would be useful, as well as having a specific interface for creating Smart Playlists in the first place. The new search that was introduced a few updates ago also nerfed Smart Playlists as well; you used to be able to use the search box to filter the library view and add to playlist that way. Keyword-filtering for Smart Playlists! It was great. But the new search doesn’t do that anymore.
