Right now it’s really tedious to work around the lack of a contains / does not contain selector when creating smart playlists.
A simple use case is building a music smart playlist containing a specific genre (example: “Electronic”) or perhaps one not containing a specific genre (example: “Live”).
Right now you can kind of work around this with ridiculously long, complex and brittle groups of rules. But contain is already supported for a bunch of other metadata fields in Plex, so this seems like just bad UX.
I come from the iTunes world where creating this kind of rule set is trivial. And my tracks (and films) will often have multiple genre tags, so it can get ugly very quickly if you have to account for every combination containing the target genre in one filter.
My specific use case is for genre, but expanded support for contain to all/most relevant metadata fields would make smart playlists more flexible and much easier to create and maintain.
Plex treats different genres as own filterable options.
So… if your movie has 3 genres (Drama, Comedy and Family) – filtering your library by Comedy should find it.
I’ve seen users relying on embedded metadata using weird separators. This might result in Plex treating that genre-string as a single genre (e.g. Drama_Comedy_Family). Using a common separator should work fine.
In my Music library, there are 2,902 songs which have the genre “Rock”. Many of those have more than genre, for example “Rock” and “Live” or “Rock” and “Soundtrack” or “Rock” and “Blues” etc.
But if create an advanced filter in Plex which has just one rule “Match any of the following: Track Genre is Rock”, I get just 133 hits from the same library.
Unless I add all of the other combined genres (like “Rock, Live”) in what is effectively a clumsy logical OR, I’ll never get a list of all tracks containing “Rock” as at least one of the genre types.
Part of this is a limitation of how MP3 tags work, by concatenating genres into a single comma delimited field. iTunes and Apple Music (and possibly other apps) have no issue with creating the entire “Rock” playlist because they support the contains operator versus looking for a exact string match.
Like I said, Plex already supports contains for Artist Title, Album Title, Track Title and Record Label, I’m just suggesting that could extended to other metadata fields where someone may want to filter on a substring, like genre.
Can concur on this thread. I don’t tag single genres in any music; it’s often a comma-delimited list to define a very broad genre, such as “Rock.” The Genre field (or mood, depending on mp3 tag types) becomes more identifiable with a list like “Rock, Goth Rock, Death Rock” or similar.
This is a shortcoming in creating playlists where the smart filters only allow “Genre IS” or “Style IS”.
I am using a semicolon to delimit multiple genres (I thought that I had read someplace that semicolon was the preferred separator, but whatever). This almost always works in my smart playlist filters for matching a single genre in a genre tag like “Rock;Alternative”. The annoying problem is…sometimes it doesn’t work, and I have no idea why. For instance, if I have rule that says “Track Genre is not Christmas”, it correctly filters out almost all tracks with the genre tag “Christmas;Rock”, but not all of them. Terribly vexing.
