It would be nice to be able to create a Smart playlist from a CSV.
I know rule groups would be a hurdle, but an easier place to start would be say - We have a CSV with three columns.
It could be three columns to represent the three pieces of a smart playlist - Criteria such as Album Title / Artist Title / whatever, Contains / Is / Is Not / whatever, search term.
This would allow people to take lists like Rolling Stone’s top 500 albums of all time, dump them into the CSV format Plex wants, then create a smart playlist for it without having to manually add 500 criteria lines.
I’m currently trying to understand your use case. The Rolling Stone‘s top 500 albums appear to be more of a static playlist (given there’s no metadata for RS rating/rank).
Just curious as I don’t really see the purpose of importing just the criteria…
As for static lists / references… there’s a few existing suggestions to allow importing playlists from various files.
Importing the criteria creates the playlist for you. As opposed to doing it in the app.
Because maybe you don’t have all 500 but you want to add as many as you do and if you ever get another, the smart playlist will add it where it should go. You’re basically saying - any album I have in this list - add to a smart playlist.
Even that’s moot. Being able to create a Smart playlist from a csv saves work. It saves time. If you ever had to recreate it, it’d be easy.
Maybe you don’t want to manually add 30 pieces of criteria to a smart playlist. There are lots of use cases.
Unless there’s an option I don’t know about that let’s you just supply a list.
You’re essentially saying that Smart Playlists shouldn’t have Album Title as a criteria option.
It’s your suggestion and I don’t want to muddy the water. I just don’t get based on what criteria you would be creating that particular playlist. How will Plex know which songs to consider to be part of that RS’s top 500 albums
No offense or any malcontent… I’m just seriously curious and don’t see it. My way of thinking was you have that reference list and tell Plex to add all albums from your library that are on that list to playlist. Or are you suggesting to have a smart playlist with 500 criteria (album name = RS’s top 1 album, album name = RS’s top 2 album…, album name = RS’s top 500 album)?
To be fair… I haven’t yet tried adding so many criteria – it might be interesting to see if/how Plex deals with that
I created a Python package to handle this. I am going to test adding a large amount of criteria soon like Roll Stone’s top 500 to see how Plex handles it. It imports and exports playlists / playlist criteria. The entire purpose it to reduce work and rely on Plex’s dynamic Smart Playlist’s.
As far as, “How will Plex know which songs to consider to be part of that RS’s top 500 albums”
