I posted this to the Plex subreddit, but I’m copying it here in hopes that it gets more attention.
Plex smart playlists need some massive improvements. The core is there, but the features needed to make it truly robust are a glaring absence. The syntax used to create smart search arguments has been around for decades.
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AND, OR, and NOT arguments - these are essential.
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Nested arguments - allows for particular specificity
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Don’t lock filters behind organization type. Why can’t I create a playlist based on my song’s rating AND my album’s tags/genre?
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More filters!! You already have so much metadata, PLEASE let us put it to use!
There are many more that I can think of, but these are the most important ones off the top of my head. Right now you can only pick between a handful of filters depending on the category in which you’re viewing, and the relationship between them is obfuscated.
For an important example, this is the structure of my go-to smart playlist in iTunes. It contains my top-rated music (except a few genres and properties) as well as newest (unrated) library additions:
"Media Kind" IS "Music"
AND
"Genre" IS NOT "Spoken"
AND
"Genre" IS NOT "Holiday"
AND
"Time" IS RANGE "01:30 - 08:00"
AND
"Rating" IS RANGE "★★★★ - ★★★★★"
OR
"Date Added" IS LESS THAN "6 Weeks Ago"
AND
"Rating" IS NOT "★"
AND
"Rating" IS NOT "★★"
AND
"Rating" IS NOT "★★★"
With Plex, the closest I can get to this is
"Library" IS "Music"
"Category" IS "Track"
"Rating" IS "★★★★ - ★★★★★"
or
"Library" IS "Music"
"Category" IS "Album"
"Genre" IS "[literally every single category selected except Holiday and Spoken]"
Neither of these are close enough to be useful.
The thing is, Plex has massive potential to be even more robust than iTunes. I could tag playlists to exclude music with specific sharing labels (handy for keeping some of my toddler’s music out); I could take advantage of the Similar Artists in my metadata; I could add additional genres to albums as appropriate without worrying about it ruining the smart playlists (because iTunes doesn’t handle multiple genres); etc. There’s so much potential, but the current implementation wastes it.
To add insult to injury, this is referring to the web interface, and the app interface is even worse (referring to iOS). I cannot seem to select multiple filters; either it’s designed not to or the app crashes when I attempt it.
Please put some focus on making your smart playlist feature useful, because its current implementation is holding me (and likely many others) back from making it our default music source; and improvements will carry over to other media libraries as well. I’ve already added my thumbs-up to forum requests in these categories, but they don’t seem to be getting any attention. Hopefully someone reads this and puts in the time to make smart playlists truly useful!
