Is there any way to import playlists I’ve created in other software into Plex (itunes, m3u files, etc)?
For me this is a gotta-have feature before I can move all the way into Plex.
I have the same issue, started testing Plex to migrate fully from using iTunes and there’s no way to import playlists 
So, I found a workaround solution. You can use the instructions here to do a “backdoor” import into Plex via Soundiiz. Just create an account and link to your Plex server. Then you can import your iTunes playlist via file to your Plex server. Odd you can’t do this via the Plex server web interface itself, but this works.
I tried using musconv tools and it worked great. its a great way to transfer your playlist s and favorites
I bought the software and would like to see a native import function. This is far more important to me than the “free” movies that you provide that are several decades old.
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Its not super great that we have to rely on a 3rd party to do what Plex should do natively…thank you for making us all far more insecure by having to trust a third party to import our playlists…Plex Devs… Please take note.
What I want…and its not much…
- Playlist import
- DTS and TrueHD passthrough
Outside of that the software is great, but without these two features it well breaks a lot of functionality.
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Being able to import playlists is a big deal for me. This seems like a basic feature.
I bought the Plex Pass last year exclusively for the music features. I want to play my music library on my iPhone.
Riffing on stevefarbeck’s comment, what I want…and its not much…
- Playlist import
- fix the iOS issue where it forgets your Plex library when you disconnect from bluetooth. The one where you have to close Plex, then re-launch to be able to play music again.
I REALLY, REALLY want to love Plex. It is SO CLOSE to being everything I want for my media collection. But I can’t bring myself to paying for a lifetime membership with these basic things missing.
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I posted a way to import .M3U files in this thread. It requires knowledge of Python and the Python PlexAPI to get it to work.
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rvatalar- thanks for posting the link to your code. I’ll have to take a look at that later.
To stevjarbeck and KenBoyer1969’s point…Plex REALLY should have this functionality built in…it doesn’t seem to me that it would be that difficult to add…in looking through previous threads, it looks like this was once a feature in Plex, but has since been removed.
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Have to +100 this. I have a few great playlists that I find myself recreating each time I create (upgrade) my servers. It would be nice to be able to share playlists with friends as well, in which case an EXPORT and IMPORT feature should be included.
On Import, here are some options to consider:
- Import as new playlist.
- Import to existing playlist
- a means for handling dupes…
- a means of flagging imported playlist entries for movies you don’t have in your library (yet).
For example, this is just my pre-2000 “car movies” playlist…
Macon County Line (1974)
Running on Empty (1982)
The Last American Hero (1973)
Sex Drive (2008)
The Sugarland Express (1974)
Ferris Beuller’s Day Off (1986)
Grease (1978)
Le Mans (1971)
Vanishing Point (1971)
Bullitt (1968)
The Car (1977)
Corvette Summer (1978)
American Graffitti (1973)
More American Graffitti (1979)
The Hollywood Knights (1980)
Duel (1971)
Cannonball (1976)
Cannonball Run (1981)
Cannonball Run II (1984)
The Gumball Rally (1976)
The Wraith (1986)
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
The Junkman (1982)
Deadline Auto Theft (1983)
Gone in 60 Seconds 2 (1989)
Smokey and the Bandit (1977)
Mad Max (1980)
The Fast and the Furious (1954)
The Italian Job (1969)
Thunder Road (1958)
Christine (1983)
Grand Theft Auto (1977)
Eat My Dust (1976)
Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)
Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974)
Grand Prix (1966)
Hooper (1978)
Stroker Ace (1983)
Six Pack (1982)
The Seven-Ups (1973)
Freebie and the Bean (1974)
Days of Thunder (1990)
Convoy (1978)
Highway to Hell (1991)
Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988)
Miami Vice (2006)
Bad Boys (1995)
The French Connection (1971)
The Driver (1978)
Thunder Road (1958)
White Lightning (1973)
License to Drive (1988)
Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)
Tommy Boy (1995)
Used Cars (1980)
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
The Getaway (1972)
National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983)
Black Dog (1998)
Death Race 2000 (1975)
Thelma & Louise (1991)
The Hitcher (1986)
The Blues Brothers (1980)
Taxi Driver (1976)
The California Kid (1974)
Roadhouse 66 (1984)
Double Nickels (1977)
Speedtrap (1977)
Fireball 500 (1966)
The Love Bug (1968)
Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo (1977)
Herbie Rides Again (1974)
Winning (1969)
Cherry 2000 (1987)
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dlvphotography_yahoo_com, while I agree that Plex could better support playlists, there are some things I think are done better ways. I’ll explain what I do with DLNA.
I have never tried Plex’s DLNA server. I use Windows Media Player (WMP) and stream to a Denon 3310CI AVR. The “trick” is in all the software I had to develop to get this to work. But it works very, very well. First, there is the problem that, at least on the PC WMP is running on, WMP does not understand .WAV files. My base audio library is .WAV files. (I convert them to .FLAC and .MP3 for apps.) You can program WMP (and many other Microsoft programs) using in HTML, so I embedded script in program-generated web pages, where I can set options, etc. The script, when run, goes into the WMP database and attaches Artist, Contributing Artist, Track, Title, etc. into the record. The result is as if the .WAV files are tagged like .MP3 and .FLAC files contain tags.
The next step is to realize what I want to do. I have a special z9 playlist of 800+ songs. I would want to play this randomly, but I would also want to find a song and play it, and I would also like to find a Contributing Artist and play that group of songs. How to do this? It turns out that you can accomplish this by creating a hierarchy of folders and request DLNA to scan by folder. The “leaf” of the hierarchy is a .M3U file. This hierarchy-of-folders approach extends to the whole library of 18000+ songs, organized by Contributing Artists.
Now building these various hierarchies requires programming. But it also requires acknowleging the restrictions of a screen. The Denon AVR shows what’s playing, etc. on its display, but there are times you want a bigger screen, so turn on the TV. Now you realize you only have room for seven (7) lines comfortably. One of the difficulties in this programming assignment is realizing that (as an example) the top-level of a hierarcy is going to be “#” (for songs that start with a number, e.g., Beach Boys 409) and then letters. With 7 vertical display slots on the TY (which is determined by Denon), you have to programmatically divide the letters A-F, G-J, etc. But you want to balance them. Within a letter, say, B, there could be a lot of artists starting with B. So you want to divide the full array so there are at most 7 sections of B. That requires you break up the B artists into alphabetical ranges. But within a range, there could be subranges. Etc. It gets quite tricky, but the computer can handle it if you can program it. In my code I also have special artists, e.g., Beatles, that never get drawn into a group — they get a line in the display for themselves. Under the Beatles of course there are a large number of albums, which, FWIW, I organize from CD into “fake” albums based on the vinyl I grew up with, e.g., Meet the Beatles.
By now I am sure I’ve scared off anyone thinking of doing this. (I did do it.) But the main point is how do you do this in Plex, even if it could import .M3U files? Notice in the above “folder system” the .M3U files are free to point to a SINGLE FILE no matter how many playlists it is in. (A song would be in the main hierarchy for all artists. A z9 song would be in two addition hierarchies: organized by song title and song artist.) (I’ve got sloppy here and elsewhere in this post. By “artist” I always mean what WMP calls Contributing Artist.) In Plex I could create these hierarchies and make a flood of libraries, but that would require putting copies of the music in multiple places — a waste. The idea of “shortcuts” might work. And there’s also some weird ways to assign “fake” names to real files (with real names) that do NOT use shortcuts. (It’s some sort of Windows feature I read exists, but I did not study it.) Importantly I don’t know if any of these “tricks” would work with Plex. And without a commitment to feature support, I would not go through the trouble. While it is nice having a music library in Plex, it is not very useful to me. I much prefer what I’ve done with DLNA. And even there — even Denon changed the way their implementation works, and other gear I have works differently than with the older Denon. The result is I tend not to trust anyone but myself and tech that is likely to stay UNUPDATED, which describes my older version of WMP on one of my DLNA streaming PC and my Denon 3310CI AVR.
If anyone has any suggestions for how to do the above in Plex, I am all ears.
I am not going to proof this after I post it, at least not now.
Finally, as an aside, I have “Alexa” all over my house. I would like to ask “her” to play a song by name from my library. This is supposed to be possible in Plex with a Skill. I couldn’t get it to work. This is supposed to be possible with my Synology file server and a Skill. I couldn’t get it to work. The only thing I could get to work was stuff I programmed for use on systems that don’t get updated with incompatible changes.
Maybe I’m missing something, but have you tried the Playlist tab in WebTools v3? It allows export/import. I haven’t tried m3u but it works for m3u8, so not sure if UTF-8 is required for import. Worst case you may be able to convert m3u to m3u8.
You can also use WebTools/Playlists to copy playlists to other users of your server.
I used it to import the playlists from my old server to the new. It got a few tracks wrong (correct track title, wrong artist) and missed a few tracks entirely due to metadata differences between servers, but I’ll take 95% accuracy over having to use 3rd party tools or linking my plex admin account to…well, anything.
Hello! Sorry for my confusion on this but when i use plex web browser i am not seeing any of these options like you mention. Not sure what webtools v3 is but nothing i have is near that version.
What am i missing?
Pete
No prob, I’ll try to help.
So the default port for your plex web interface is 32400, so to launch it you probably use some variation of: http://[server name or ip address]:32400/
I think most (maybe all?) installs of Plex Server also install an official plugin called Web Tools (currently on version 3.0.0). The default port for this is 33400, so try hitting this URL: http://[server name or ip address]:33400/
Use your main account to authenticate at the login screen.
Once logged in, there should be a button in the left pane called ‘Playlists’. That’ll give you a series of playlist options like ‘Import’, ‘Download’, ‘Copy’, ‘Share’.
I used it when migrating servers and, admittedly, I had to do a bit of cleanup due to it misappropriating songs by (I’m assuming) ‘track title’ matching; but it did save me time overall.
Give it a shot and let me know if I can clear up the instructions.
Thanks for the reply! I was not aware there was another port that the server uses like that. it does not appear that i have Webtools as the port does not reply. I am downloading that now, although it shows “Sadly, dev work has been put on hold, due to plugins been discontinued by Plex” so we’ll see how this goes…
The problem with this tool is, is that it can only import playlists downloaded with Webtool. So playlists that were created using a different program won’t work.
This is such a critical (and elementary) feature, and so many of these essential functionalities were provided by the plugin-building community. It’s tragic that Plex chose to destroy the community contributions in favor of pushing their own “vision” of the platform, which apparently is that of streaming garbage TV from the 1990s.
Plex does allow importing iTunes playlists (although it is not coded very robustly) - see here for instructions: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200289536-plugins/?_ga=2.247242628.1836139243.1592112289-1624619057.1546469563
Note you need to restart (quit, the start) PMS after enabling the plugin. Also, the songs need to be in the same folder structure as the iTunes Library.xml file (ie. not on a separate disk or something). Also, if you are on the latest MacOS which uses the Music App instead of actual iTunes, you need to manually export the whole iTunes library to a .xml file (using the ‘Export Library’) menu each time you want to update. Also, if iTunes has any files only in the cloud (ie. not downloaded to your computer) you will get a cryptic error message, so make sure they are all downloaded to the computer in question.
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What about SHARING playlists??
i would love to see a way to share playlists with people. i understand this is a permissions problem, but if everyone has the same permissions to a certain library, this should be easy enough to implement. **
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I would like an import playlist function
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