I searched and I did not find this particular concept anywhere, and I think this request is substantially different enough from the previous requests mentioned below to warrant its own post (I hope it’s not a duplicate).
A long-standing request has been some way to organize playlists in Plexamp, using either Apple Music/Spotify-style folders, or the ability to add playlists to Collections. Another popular request has been that there be a way to organize the Downloads page in Plexamp. I think I may have an idea to accomplish both of those goals (as well as a number of other potentially powerful quality of life improvements) without having to change any code at all on the server side.
I was looking at Playlists in Plex and wondering where it might be possible to add metadata, and there aren’t a lot of fields to play with (at least not exposed to the user), but there is the Summary field. And it occurred to me: What if simple text strings in the Summary field could be parsed in Plexamp as tags?
For example, let’s say the following text was in the Summary field of a playlist (I’m just making the syntax up–it can be anything that makes sense from a programming perspective):
{{artist=“The Beatles”}}
Okay, now an artist has been assigned to the playlist.
In Plexamp, this metadata can be used in any number of ways.
For a start, on the Playlists page, there could now be a clickable/tappable “Artists” line. You click it and then, like with a folder, you see “The Beatles”. You click that and you see any playlists with “{{artist=“The Beatles”}}” in the summary field.
Obviously using artist as an organizing method is just one option. You could use:
{{genre=“Classic Rock”}}
{{mood=“Boisterous”}}
etc…
You could also make completely arbitrary classifications that would just work like folder names on the Playlists page:
{{group=“Workout Music”}}
{{group=“Long Drive”}}
etc…
The great thing about tagging, as opposed to folders, is that each playlist can have any number of tags so, say, playlists in your “Workout Music” group might also show up in your “Dance Party” group playlist, etc. and you’d only have to maintain one version of that playlist.
I would strongly advocate for this same organizational layout to show up on the Downloads page. For those of us who use a lot of playlists and want the option to access a bunch of our music offline should the need arise, it would immediately transform the Downloads page from being almost unusable to being a pleasure!
Speaking of Downloads, another powerful thing that could potentially be implemented would be a way to set any playlist with a certain tag to always be downloaded and kept in sync–though it would require some added complexity (a setting somewhere where you could add a list of tags, maybe in a three-dot menu on the Downloads page), it would be a great way to add a set-it-and-forget-it aspect to the downloading process.
Yet another awesome feature that this could make possible would be adding a Playlists section to each Artist page that has any playlists tagged with that artist. I’ve seen feature requests for adding any playlist with songs by a given artist automatically to the Artist’s page, but I think this would be better, because I can actually think of several times I’d want a playlist with no songs by the artist in question to actually show up on their page. As a quick example, let’s say I’ve made playlists of my favorite songs from John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison’s solo careers and I wanted to see those on my Beatles page (similarly, many artists have side projects or collaborations you might want to make into playlists that show up on that artist’s page). We could do that with tags, but not if the system relied on the presence of songs by a particular artist in the playlist.
This could also be done with genre, moods, styles, etc. All you’d have to do to see playlists added to any of these pages would be to tag them accordingly.
Adding playlists to artist and other pages could be down the road, though. The key functionality would be organizing the Playlists and Downloads pages.
I will say that, personally, this would make it possible for me to finally ditch Apple Music for good and use Plexamp as my primary music player. Which I would LOVE to do. I can’t, though, because I have hundreds of highly curated playlists that I’ve built and organized over years. I use these playlists as virtual albums and listen to them front-to-back (I’ve never been a fan of shuffle–I like how particular songs play off of each other). It’s really the primary way I interact with my music collection. So implementing this, or something like it, in Plexamp would make a massive difference to me. But I know I’m not alone in wanting a way to organize playlists and the Downloads page, and tags are extremely flexible, so I think this would be a big improvement for a lot of users. Once implemented, I think people would start coming up with all sorts of creative ways to take advantage of the feature.
I imagine the hard part, from a coding perspective, is implementing a way for users to add and manage these tags in the Plexamp interface. If I let myself get carried away, I can certainly see it getting very complex. But, really, adding a “Add/Edit Tags” option to the Edit Playlist page (that, on the back end, simply adds the appropriate strings to the Summary field) would be enough to get started–tags are just a string of text after all. Ideally, it would be possible to select multiple playlists on the Playlists page and add tags to all of the selected playlists at once, but since there is currently no way to select multiple playlists, I know that would be a bigger lift. Going one at a time would be a slight hassle, but well worth it for the added functionality. I’d hate to see such a game-changing feature tanked because of something optional like that.
Anyway, is this feasible at all? It’s a single feature that, for me anyway, really would make all the difference.
Thank you for considering the idea.
