The Plexivus post for today says, “The next part of Plexivus Giving is seeing what Plex can give to you. What would your ideal Plexivus gift from us be?”
Here’s what I asked for…
I would really like a concerted effort to clean up the problems with music imports from iTunes. The state of the iTunes music import is a big ugly blot on an otherwise great product. It has been allowed to fester for far too long (at least 2-1/2 years). For those not familiar the import from iTunes suffers from the following issues…
- Plex does not properly handle importing smart playlists.
- Plex does not properly handle importing song ratings, substituting iTunes defacto album ratings for song ratings.
- Plex does not properly delete playlist folders deleted from iTunes and does not provide any way to manage, aka delete, them from within Plex.
- Plex players inconsistently present any iTunes folder hierarchy. Some players present a flat list of all playlists without folders, others present the folder hierarchy. This makes it very hard to organize any long listing of playlists, forcing the user to come up with a playlist naming convention that works both ways.
I know that the Plex iTunes import could properly do all the above things. The Plex iTunes music channel does. But the music channel is not nearly as rich in its visual presentation of the music.
So, for Christmas, I would love a fix (or even an commitment to fix) this mess so that I can enjoy the beautiful visual presentation of music that Plex provides.
P.S. I’d also recommend a forum area devoted to each of the major media types handled by Plex… TV, Movies, Photos, Music. There really is no appropriate place to post requests focused on music. The forums seem to have a developer centric organization instead of a function centric organization.
Sorry for the duplicate post (post is duplicated in General Discussions (Public)). The forums were very unresponsive and did not give me confirmation of the first post.
@bobketcham said:
- Plex does not properly handle importing smart playlists.
@“MovieFan.Plex” said:
Plex will import any smart playlist that can be recreated with Plex. We don’t use some of the rules iTunes does so it’s not possible to recreate every rule.
Response from @bobketcham) A fairly simple smart playlist rule that Plex will not import. “Rating is greater than two stars”.
@bobketcham said:
2) Plex does not properly handle importing song ratings, substituting iTunes defacto album ratings for song ratings.
@“MovieFan.Plex” said:
Plex should import individual song ratings.
Response from @bobketcham) Import a CD into iTunes. Leave the album unrated. Rate one song 5 stars. Import iTunes into Plex. The album and all songs are rated 5 stars in Plex.
@bobketcham said:
3) Plex does not properly delete playlist folders deleted from iTunes and does not provide any way to manage, aka delete, them from within Plex.
@“MovieFan.Plex” said:
Importing Playlist is a 1 time task. It does not sync back to iTunes. If you change anything in iTunes, you have to do it manually in Plex. If you re-import, playlists do get updated, but Plex doesn’t track is a playlist came from iTunes so if that playlist no longer exists in iTunes, Plex won’t know to delete it.
Response from @bobketcham) Please note that the comment was not about deleting playlists. There are mechanisms within Plex for deleting playlists and controls to decide whether to overwrite or not. I can manage having Plex track my changed playlists. The comment was about PLAYLIST FOLDERS (sorry for shouting). I have to resort to command line tools outside of Plex to delete playlist folders.
@bobketcham said:
4) Plex players inconsistently present any iTunes folder hierarchy. Some players present a flat list of all playlists without folders, others present the folder hierarchy. This makes it very hard to organize any long listing of playlists, forcing the user to come up with a playlist naming convention that works both ways.
@“MovieFan.Plex” said:
I’m confused on this one. Plex does not support nested playlists if that is what you mean, so you should only see flat lists in any Plex client.
Response from @bobketcham) My current set of imported playlists present in …
The web player 3.32.2 as a flat hierarchy of 106 playlists.
The IOS player as a flat hierarchy of 10 playlists (these are the playlists that are found at the root level of the nested hierarchy).
The Roku player as a hierarchy of folders and playlists. This is currently a mix of old and new folders because I have not recently deleted abandoned folders via the command line in terminal. I think all 106 playlists are contained in the hierarchy somewhere. Please note that I did however, delete one-by-one, every single playlist and the entire music library before doing the most recent import.
@bobketcham said:
I know that the Plex iTunes import could properly do all the above things. The Plex iTunes music channel does. But the music channel is not nearly as rich in its visual presentation of the music.
@“MovieFan.Plex” said:
The iTunes channel is not importing. It reads directly from iTunes, but I believe it’s read only.
Response from @bobketcham) Agree. But unlike the import, it does read and present all of the above correctly.
I’ve changed my mind about what I want from from Plex for Plexivus. Now, I would happily settle for a Plex Employee who would actually read, consider and perhaps test the issues I have compiled. The way the import works today makes it very difficult to enjoy the Plex music product.
@“MovieFan.Plex” said:
@bobketcham said:
- Plex does not properly handle importing smart playlists.
Plex will import any smart playlist that can be recreated with Plex. We don’t use some of the rules iTunes does so it’s not possible to recreate every rule.
In this case, import the playlist as a static playlist, please - the song list for smart playlists are available in the xml! Just import them, it would be better than nothing.
(Or fix smart playlist logic… 
)
I have issues importing iTunes data as well. My setup is a bit more complicated though.
- Plex is installed on a Linux server
- iTunes is on my Macbook and that is where I manage my music
- Entire iTunes folder is synced through dropbox
- Synced iTunes folder is synced to Linux server where Plex is installed
- Plex Music folder points to this folder and imports the music just fine but not the iTunes data
The original idea was to always have my library updated (which is the case). I just wish it would correctly import the iTunes data. I made sure the box was checked when creating the music library and have tried several times to create a new library with it. The iTunes XML file is there and everything but it never works.
I am using MacOS 10.13.4 with a QNAP server for my music database. About 25K tracks which I meticulously maintain in the current iTunes. All metadata is clean and perfect before I use SuperSync to update the server database. Plex just does not do a good job of adding the new tracks and metadata to the server. I can verify the information is correct on the server and it can take days before it shows up and even then the metadata can take even longer. There are so many issues I have found with how the software handles the data. An example,
- how do you delete a poster that Plex adds to the metadata which is incorrect? I always have the track artwork correct for each individual track before uploading.
- I have several thousand single tracks with each having its own artwork. Plex will only show one poster for all of those tracks based on the artist. It thinks the single track is an album for that artist and loads one poster for all the tracks even though I have manually uploaded the artwork for each track. In the metadata editing software, the “Single” is identified in the “Album” as that is the only place to identify it as a single track. This may be the reason for the Plex software attaching only one poster. Even if I could go into Plex and assign the artwork to an individual track, manually, it would be better, but you can’t do that. If you change and pick a different poster it just assigns it to all the tracks under that artist.
- This is true for the release date as well. The individual release dates may very well be different but only one date will be shown.
That’s just a few areas that need to be improved for using the software for a music database instead of video. If anyone has a “work-around” or knowledge how I can tailor the software to be more music friendly I would be forever grateful.
