The way Plex currently handles ratings when making smart playlists is that 1,2,3,4,5 are considered “ratings”, however EMPTY is not considered a rating unless it is specified by a separate filter, that is incompatible with the other filters.
This causes a big problem when trying to create smart playlists, so much so that I actually thought it was just a bug at first.
Here is why this is such a big issue:
Lets say I want to create a smart playlist that includes all tracks that are:
Genre = Rock
Track rating = NOT1
Track rating = NOT2
This SHOULD produce a playlist comprised of all “Rock” songs that are rated 3,4, or 5 stars and should also include songs that are not rated, however this is not the case. This setup simply shows all rock songs that are rated 3,4, and 5 stars.
To add insult to injury if I wanted to not include unrated tracks I can already do that by adding a 3rd rating filter like below. So the current condition is already possible to create using filters, so this does not need to be happening automatically.
Track rating = NOT EMPTY
However there is no possible way to create the original desired condition as the following does not work, it simply returns an empty list.
Genre = Rock
Track rating = NOT1
Track rating = NOT2
Track rating = IS EMPTY
So the problem is that there is currently no way to create a smart playlist that will automatically pickup NEW (eg. unrated) music and add it to a smart playlist along with your current songs.
This could be easily fixed by simply allowing 0, null, EMPTY (whatever you want to call it) to “count” as a valid rating. So the smart playlist would consider ratings between 0,1,2,3,4,5 instead of just 1,2,3,4,5.
This could also be rectified in a different way. If you added the ability to use “Logic Operators” when creating smart playlists. We could take the current filters, and further their power immensely by adding operators such as; AND, OR, XOR, NOT, NAND, NOR and XNOR.
