Creating a smart playlist that only can include a specific set of tracks?

General Discussions
1

I’m trying to create a smart playlist that filters a set of tracks based on how recently they’ve last been played.

However I don’t want the tracks to be determined by their artist or album. I want it to be a curated set of tracks that spans multiple albums. So far, though, I haven’t found a good way to do this.

Possible ways this could work:

  • Allow one of the criteria for a smart playlist to be “is in playlist XYZ”. Then I could just create a regularly playlist that contains the music I want. This would be the best way to do it, and it’d be an enormously powerful feature. A number of other users have requested it.
  • Allow smart playlists to filter tracks based on their tags / moods. It’s annoying that I can’t use this metadata in a smart playlist!

Here are the ways I’ve figured out how to do it so far:

  • Since I don’t use track ratings, I can set the rating of tracks I want to include (or exclude) in the playlist to something other than an empty rating. But I don’t feel like that’s a good usage of track ratings.
  • Include an invisible character in the title of every track I want to include, and then use as criteria “Track Title Contains” and set it to the invisible character. This only seems to work with the character [ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER (U+200C)], and this is a really clumsy way of tagging a track for inclusion in a smart playlist. But it’s the only other method I’ve found that works!

Is there a better way to do this?

2

Set your music library to the ‘Tracks’ view mode.
Then call up the ‘Custom Filters’.
There should be a filter for ‘track last played’ and several others you can use.
Then you can define a sorting order for your filtered track list by clicking on the header title. You might have to add the necessary column first.
Once you are finished with filtering and sorting, click on the ‘Add to playlist’ icon. This will give you an auto-updating “smart” playlist.

3

@OttoKerner I do understand how to make smart playlists. My question was about how to limit the tracks that can appear in it to a specific set of tracks, along with the “track last played” criteria.

Like what I want would be best accomplished by combining “track last played” and “track is in playlist” if Plex supported the latter, but unfortunately it doesn’t. So I’m looking for alternative methods for accomplishing the same thing.

4

“How would this specific set of tracks be defined?” is the real question then.
Please explain what you have in mind.

5

I already did in my original question and reply. Is there anything that’s unclear that I can clarify further?

6

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