I just spent three days building a Music playlist, and was nearly done, when all of a sudden I refresh the page and… it has every single track in my collection. I’d added about 500 tracks, so far, but now there’s 10,000 tracks.
My original work is still the first 500ish tracks in the list. How do I get my work back?
I don’t think I did anything. There was no “oops” moment. But even if there was, is there any kind of undo?
Is there a way to script this? I looked at the Plex API web page but I don’t see anything in there for editing playlists, just retrieving them. I’m a software engineer so I can handle it if there’s programming tools out there. I’d even consider direct database modifications, if there’s a clear description of all the tables and on data consistency requirements.
I realize I could also sit there and delete tracks manually through the web interface. But now I’ve lost faith in the web interface, and don’t want to blow things up further if the database is somehow corrupt. And so I’m also wondering about backing up my playlists somehow (scripts again?) , with a way to restore them if needed. This has really shaken my faith in this software.
This was many many hours of work, and I don’t want it to be lost.
I’m frustrated too… have to create my playlist alphabetically to have any kind of idea of which artists I’ve already added… which only works so long as my library doesn’t change, after that it becomes more iffy.
Can’t search my playlist, can’t sort it differently… it’s not intelligent enough to do anything with. I mean, a playlist is fine - and if a track is moved or renamed, Plex should be able to handle the remapping to a new track once the indexing is done, but no.
So much potential just… wasted.
A playlist COULD be: “I want this track by this artist on this playlist, and then Plex could just add them once they arrive or something.”
I can’t believe playlist management is so horrid…
As for your particular issue, if you have set backups up, I’d recommend restoring an older backup immediately.
Not completely similar, I have not seen changes in my playlists so far.
A few weeks ago I started to create a Collection named Best Artists.
Last week I saw it was empty and I could not add anything to the collection because of an error.
This and your issue with playlists make me question the stability of Plex and I will become more hesitated about using Plexamp until I know what happened. Unfortunately I have not seen any support at this.
I agree with what @Froberg said about playlists, it is too basic. No sign in an album what track is part of a playlist, no warning when adding a double track, no folders.
Update: I solved the problem by deleting 9500 tracks manually. Which sounds awful, but it wasn’t too bad, because after you’ve selected a track for deletion, if you shift-select another one all of the tracks in between are selected. I risked doing a thousand at a time and it didn’t take long. NOTE however that if you use the scrollbar, this feature doesn’t work - it loses your original selection and doesn’t fill in between. But it does work if you scroll up using the scrollwheel on your mouse.
I did not even know about backups. Apparently either I turned this on or it’s on automatically. I’ll know for next time, thanks.
And yes another frustration is that you can’t reorder playlists once they get too big. The dragging items around thing just seems to stop working.
