Any reason to keep standard playlists after creating smart playlists?

General Discussions
1

I am in the process of creating smart playlists for all of my videos and movies due primarily to the fact that smart playlists auto-sort alphabetically. Is there any good reason to keep the old original standard playlists or should I just delete them to avoid playlist duplication?

2

Smart and dumb playlists serve different purposes.
Only you can know if you’re going to need the dumb playlists anymore or not.

But if you delete the dumb playlists, you can copy the content of the smart playlist back into a dumb playlist, if you need it:

3

dumb playlists are static. they don’t change unless you change something (add/remove/reorder/etc).

smart playlists are dynamic, so may change as your content change.

also, smart playlists can be sorted by other things too such as year or whatever.

4

Thanks you OttoKerner for your reply and the link you provided for creating dumb playlists from smart ones. This is exactly the safety net I need before deleting all of my dumb playlists. The only sorting feature that I want from any playlist is alphabetical sorting. If Plex offered this feature without having to resort to a smart playlists, I would leave my dumb playlists intact.

5

Thanks TeknoJunky for your post. Based on what I am seeing, using custom sorting on a library you can choose sorting options before you create the smart playlist, but there appears to be no way to change the sorting once the playlist has been created. Please correct me if I am wrong.

6

No, unfortunately there is no way to edit a smart playlist, which is one of several super annoying playlist limitations that has not yet been resolved.

you can delete and recreate one though. :tired_face:

7

Many of my playlist wouldn’t work (as well) as Smart Playlist. Maybe I just have weird playlist styles or others should expand theirs.

Playlist: Star Wars: Rod Hilton’s Machete Order [Extended]
Description: Rod Hilton’s Machete Order, named after his own blog, offers a viewing experience that better contextualizes the prequel films without having to sacrifice the focus and surprise the original Star Wars trilogy offered. Hilton’s order theorizes that fans are able to better enjoy both the original Star Wars films and the Anakin Skywalker backstory in the prequels by viewing the film episodes in order of IV, V, II, III, VI. The Extended order adds Solo and Rogue One as the openers, and continues with the films after Jedi.

Playlist: The Man with No Name
Description: The Man with No Name is the protagonist portrayed by Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy” of Spaghetti Western films: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). He is easily recognizable due to his iconic poncho, brown hat, tan cowboy boots, fondness for cigarillos and the fact that he rarely talks. Though he is called “Joe”, “Manco” and “Blondie” in the each film respectively, since he never introduces himself by name in any of the films, he is conventionally known as “the man with no name.” This list also includes High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider as extensions of TMWNN idea as Eastwood is only referred to as “The Stranger” and “Preacher” respectively.

Other self explanatory list where alpha order is not my preference: Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy, Marvel Cinematic Universe, DC Extended Universe

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