Hi, I a few music-related questions on Plex (and I suppose Plexamp). I’m coming from a duct-taped solution called iSyncr to maintain all my offline playlists and slightly struggling to find answers to some of the potential functionality I’d like to use.
Is there any way to sort music playlists by their star rating? I use star ratings (generated on my Android and synced back to my home computer) to sort through good/bad music in my new music playlists.
Does downloading playlists on the Android Plex app not sync them with Plexamp? When I downloaded my playlists on Plexamp it would only download ~1/2 the songs for the playlist.
I have to listen to a lot of music offline. When I download a playlist to my phone and make changes, will it sync back to my home server?
If I download a playlists’s files to my phone, will it keep that playlist synced when I sync with Plex (ie. remove songs from my phone I’ve removed from my playlist, add songs I’ve added to the Plex playlist)? Or will I need to do that manually?
1 - I’m unclear on this. Playlists don’t have a star rating. If you are referring to sorting the content of a playlist, no, you cannot sort a playlist. A dumb playlist will appear as it was created. A smart playlist will use whatever sort you set for the rule. You can edit the rule but there is no “sort” you can change on the fly.
2 - PlexAmp has a 24 hr limit per downloaded item.
3 - You can’t edit a Downloaded playlist so I’m not sure what changes you are referring to.
By “star rating” I meant the 5-star rating system. At minimum I’d like to remove 1-star rated songs from my playlists. In iTunes or other solutions this is simple, you can just sort by ratings and delete. Is this not possible with Plex?
So for Plexamp, I can’t use it with playlists longer than 24 hours?
Ok.
Just to be clear: I want to be able to make changes to my playlists, at least on my computer, and have them sync with my phone. I believe this is how Plex normally works. But I have to download my playlists to my phone as I am frequently away from any cell/WiFi signal. How do I keep my downloaded playlists up-to-date? Do I need to download them again? Or is there another way to sync?
1 - You mean the ratings for tracks. Plex does not have a way to sort and/or filter a standard playlist. You could try creating a smart playlist with the criteria you want.
2 - PlexAmp will download the first 24 hrs of the playlist.
4 - If you refresh the downloaded playlist on the device, it will communicate back to your server and make any adjustments. It does not need to re-download the tracks that are not affected by your changes.
Interesting idea. Make a smart playlist whose only criteria is items where the star rating is 2 stars or above. Plex will add all songs of that rating to the playlist. Plexamp will only allow downloads of the first 24 hours of the playlist (alphabetically?).
But if you set the rating of a song to 1-star on plexamp, will it be removed automatically from the playlist right then and there (with no internet connection) or will it need to connect and sync with the server, where it will then be removed from the local device?
(I tested just now, it seems Plexamp doesn’t use 5-star ratings. It lets you “Fill the star”, “Empty the star”, or “Cross out a star”. I am not sure how these icons relate to the 5-star rating system used by the web interface of Plex.)
So Plex won’t even let me view the rating system within playlists? It works fine for the music library - I can sort by Date Added or Rating or whatever. But I can’t do anything else?
Hopefully I’m missing something. Otherwise this seems fairly useless. I can’t even easily FIND songs in my playlists.
You can change that in the preferences of Plexamp.
To how many stars Like/Dislike correlate is easily tested. Just rate them in Plexamp, then look at the album using the web app. (I think it’s 5 and 0.5 respectively)
Ooh nice, it does. I just tested it myself (I was afraid the testing process would take too long to synchronize with my web app, but it was instantaneous. Shows I ought to try it out first)
And yes, you can also select various kinds of star ratings systems. You can do a single star option (default) which toggles between “no rating”, “zero star” (half a star?), or “5 stars”. As long as you don’t care about being SUPER granular, this would be sufficient for being able to remove an item from your playlist if the playlist is a smart-one created from star-ratings. I’ll need to test later if this will instantly remove an item from my device (dangerous if I mis-tap), or if its removed when I do a manual Sync from my “downloaded” list.
