Breaking up a playlist

Plex Media Server
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OK, I’m fitting with the playlist limit in PlexAmp but I think my work around it through my playlists in the main server. PlexAmp won’t sync a playlist that is over 24 hours long. I have a playlist of “hits” (stuff I like to listen to frequently) that is about 7 days long. I’d like to create seven smaller playlists that I can then individually sync. But, I want to build this smaller lists from my main “hits” list.
Is there any way to do this? I can’t even figure out how to select songs in a playlist and add then to a new playlist.

2

There’s no direct way to achieve that.
With smart playlists you can edit the playlist’s filter criteria and save that as a new smart playlist using a different name. If you don’t change any filters, this will create a duplicate of your existing smart playlist. In order to slice it you could e.g. add some additional criteria like a range of release dates.

With a regular playlist there’s currently no means to achieve that.
You can multi-select a range of items from that playlist – however that won’t give you any options (except to delete items from the playlist).
The closest to do this will be adding the entire playlist to the Play Queue (from the playlists’s context menu → ⋮ > Add to Queue). When subsequently opening the queue’s list you can assign that to a new playlist. Same problem as with smart playlists… this will be mostly a clone of your old playlist. So you’ll subsequently need to multi-select the slices beyond your 24 hour limit and remove those from the new playlist.
In your case you’ll need to do that 7 times, each time keeping 1st, 2nd, 3rd… 7th 24-hour slot respectively.

It’s not nice but it’ll work.

3

I’ll try moving the entire list to the queue and then trim it before saving it to a new name. What a pain.

4

Are you away from your server for longer than 24 hours? If not, and this is simply to have enough music available for e.g. a daily commute, you can just download a few hours off this “master” playlist.
Once you return in the evening or restore remote access to your server, Plexamp can “refresh” the download.
Based on which tracks you played recently, these tracks then get removed from your phone and their place is filled with other tracks.

5

I’ve hit this restriction, and I want it to be longer than 24 hours because I want to use it to download the full playlist so it’s all on the device. E.g. I have over 24 hours of music by Queen and it seems a massive kludge to have to split that into two playlists.

  1. it stops my listening to random music by Queen across all albums
  2. I have to tell 2 different playlists to download (albeit only once after installing Plex)

This seems like a completely arbitrary limit to add. I have the space in my device so why is Plex setting this as an absolute maximum?

6

Tom80H,
I tried this and hit another stupid Plex problem. When you add a big playlist to the Queue and then go to the queue you only see 21 songs at a time.
There appears to be NO WAY to do this sort of manually recreating my big playlist into smaller pieces.
I appreciate you help but Plex hates me.
GRRRRRRRRRRRR.

7

If you just create the new playlist from the queue it should include all items of the original playlist (even if not all of them are immediately showing/loading in the queue.

8

tom80H, Let me try this step by step and you’ll see where it breaks down. My “HITS” playlist has 2500 items in it so I want smaller lists of about 300 items each. so,

  1. open my HITS playlist,
  2. add the HITS playlist to the queue,
  3. the queue now has 2500 items in it,
  4. I want to select the first 300 items to add to a new playlist but it only shows 21 songs so
    a) I can add 21 songs at a time until I get to 300 and repeat 120 times, or
    b) add all 2500 songs to a new playlist.
    The objective of moving through the queue was to delete 2,200 songs and then just add the remaining 300 and repeat this process 8 times.
    Have I missed a step somewhere?
9

The trick is to “clone” the playlist by adding it to the queue and immediately save that queue to a new playlist. Then you can delete the excess/spillover songs from the new playlist.

Example:

  1. add the HITS playlist to the queue
  2. create a new playlist from the content of your queue – repeat this 9x and name your new playlists “HITS 1-300”, “HITS 301-600”, “HITS 601-900”… “HITS 2101-2400”, “HITS 2401 to 2500” (naming is an example only)
  3. sequentially edit the new playlists and delete the items that don’t belong (delete items 301-2500 from “HITS 1-300”, delete items 1-300 and 601-2500 from “HITS 301-600” and so on)

Technically that’ll produce the same outcome as if you would only select 300 items from the queue and added those to a new playlist. However… as you pointed out… that’s not possible unless you’re going to add those items 21 at a time.

I’m not saying it’s not a pain but it’s possible.
To be fair, I personally will prefer simply downloading a random subset of that HITS playlist and refresh it occasionally. If your use case absolutely depends on having all 2500 songs downloaded to your mobile, the regular Plex app seems t to be better suited.

10

Tom80H I finally got it. Thanks for the hand holding.
This is a pain, but a relatively small one