I’ve been using Plex for years, but have always used another media server solution to fill in the features that Plex didn’t provide. I’ve mainly used Serviio for m3u playlists and listening to playlists over DLNA, but recently tried out Emby as well which adds Playlist sharing, support for multiple movie cuts, and trakt integration. Plex is so close to a complete solution, but just doesn’t get there without, at a minimum, the playlist support. All these features have been voted on, but no word on implementation.
@elan Any chance the features below will be implemented? I’m especially interested in m3u playlists and playlists over DLNA.
Here’s the feature request in order of which are most important to me:
Well said but I think the music requests are falling on deaf ears. I primarily use plex for Alexa and have moved on to My Media for Alexa, it’s only $5 per YEAR and works with Music, M3U Playlists and remembers where you left off in Audiobooks. It’s about 3 to 5 times faster delivering the result of the voice command than Plex. My Media also indexes in about 5 minutes with a large library, Plex sometimes takes a full day, maybe longer, on the same PC. My Media for Alexa fills my needs and is cheaper than a Plex Pass. I’m probably the only one that uses Plex primarily for music, or maybe there just aren’t enough of us to make a difference to Plex. I think it’s a reasonable request to support existing M3U playlists but I’m pretty sure the plex team disagrees based on the length of time it’s been requested and the lightning fast action they’re taking to implement the feature (ok, yes, that was sarcasm just in case you couldn’t tell).
There is a server endpoint to import M3U8 files, we’ve just never gotten around to doing the UI side around it. Do you just have a set of existing playlists you’d like to import into the server?
In terms of DLNA, we’ve been talking about “reversing” our DLNA support for pushing audio to receivers instead of using the receiver UI to pull from Plex. But it’s a fair amount of work.
Ideally I could use my existing m3u playlists and edit them as well like Emby allows me to do. Although not as ideal, an import could potentially work, but it would be nice if an export back out to m3u was included as well just in case I need to use it elsewhere in the future.
Got it, ok. Not sure how the other DLNA servers work, but as long as I can see my playlists, artists, albums, and genres through my Denon Heos app and play to the receiver, it doesn’t matter to me how it’s implemented. Understand this one will take some more time though.
Reversing the support is interesting and sounds like a nice long term solution. However, to mbarylski’s point, right now, just being able to see and play the playlist within a receiver interface would solve my issue.
I’ve recently given up and just threw together a plugin for my Marantz integrated amp to support Playlists over DLNA:
Honestly, there’s a lot of good with how Plex presents things otherwise: Sorting albums by release. It’s also one of the few DLNA-capable media servers that seems to understand what album artist means in a m4a (a lot of ALAC), so I’m not getting a bunch of noise when I add compilation albums. So it’s a head scratcher that playlists over DLNA haven’t been implemented in the 4-5 years worth of posts asking for it.
Yeah, I think the main drawback to my plugin at the moment is that it doesn’t pre-fetch or cache anything, as it’s just querying Plex at every step. So it doesn’t seem terribly fast with my small set of playlists.
I literally threw this together yesterday, so there’s probably some improvements I can make once I read through the plugin documentation more completely.
I’d love some M3U playlist support as well. I’m a user of Yamaha Musiccast and have a Yamaha receiver and multiple speakers throughout the house. I also have lots of old playlists from Windows Media Player, and this is what I usually play instead of individual albums and songs. I’ve had to resort to keeping WMP around as a DLNA server just for this feature, because Plex doesn’t support it.
As far as Playlist sharing being on your radar, are we talking months or is this just a tease that will marinate for another 5 to 6 years? As a Plex Pass member I enjoy the product and the cool little add-ons like Plexamp and Plex-Dash but seriously as a user I’d find much more benefit from being able to share Playlists instead of having Plexamp.
Understand this one will take some more time though.