Just purchased the Plex Pass. Been using Plex for a few years now, did not like the implementation of music for a long time, mainly because there was no playlist support. I know this is still not really supported fully (m3u files etc.), which is pretty crappy, but I do actually manage my playlist files from an iTunes installation on my main desktop (and just export them as m3us for other music managers).
My music however is all located on my Synology Diskstation. Does anyone know how I can get my playlists to go with my music when creating a Music library in Plex? Everything Plex puts up there for resources is extremely vague, really saying nothing more than: “Enabling this option will attempt to import your music playlists from iTunes. It will also import your ratings, the date you added the music, as well as play and skip counts for tracks in your library. This option requires that iTunes be installed in the default location on the computer running Plex Media Server.”.
So can I just copy my itunes library XML file to my Synology’s music share or something? How does this work?
Oh nice, thank you! So step 3, for the file addresses, they’re all in my Music share on the first volume, so all file paths would just start with “/volume1/Music/artist/album/song blah blah” correct? Currently the itunes library file will be pointing to all of the music’s network locations.
Will Plex automatically recognize when this library file gets updated later on then? And this works with the Vevo video features and all that jazz?
I’ll be trying this out in a few hours, thanks! I’ll have to write something that automatically syncs the library from my desktop to the synology NAS with the file location changes.
Since the FAQ doesn’t really specify, I guess I’m not entirely sure what Plex is going to look for in the file location fields. Here’s an example of what I have for a song:
The logs might give you a clue. I found I had to remove the XML sections that referred to the smart playlist criteria then they loaded fine. Too late for me to look now as on way to bed but check my other post for details
Removing the two smart playlists from the xml file did not help unfortunately. Nothing shows up in playlists after I hit “Import from Itunes”.
I did notice that if I went to Channels->Itunes->Playlists that the names of all my playlists show up in there. However, if I click on one it just says “The channel is not responding”
If I pull up terminal / SSH and paste exactly what’s in the Location node then they come up fine, so I would assume that’s what Plex would want but I don’t know for sure. I would assume it doesn’t want a windows file path, or a network location file path, etc., but I don’t know that either.
I’ll keep digging through the XML file when I get home again tonight then - it’s just a little bit difficult since it contains 60k songs lol, even Sublime Text drags quite a bit when editing it.
It would be awesome if Plex had some sort of error log reporting so I could track down exactly what issue it had, rather than just “oh it didn’t work, time for some shots in the dark” heh.
Haha awesome, thanks, I figured they must exist I just had no idea where. I’m used to digging through logs so it should be a place to start. And I’ll stop being a derp and do a better job of referencing the synology FAQ before I write now that I know that exists.
Ok, I’m getting about 2,000 “ERROR - UrlToFile: invalid url” errors. I guess I’ll have to start there - would be silly if one music file could potentially break an entire import - either something else is going on or that’s some bad programming. So here’s one example:
I don’t think it’s the %20, but I don’t really know what else it could be. If I have 61k songs, and I’m getting 2k of these errors, I would assume if it was having problems with spaces (%20) then I’d have a lot more than 2k errors. Any thoughts?
Ok progress, I did some googling, found adding file://localhost to the beginning of the location for all files allowed the import to work. So the playlists now show up.
However, new problems. I can play a playlist from the server’s web interface just fine. But if I try to play any of them from any other devices using Plex Media Player it just ends up crashing my entire Plex server almost immediately. I have to stop the Plex package and start it again (sometimes that doesn’t even work, it just times out, and I have to reboot the entire Synology).
I’m running it on a DS412+ if that makes any difference.
I included two versions of the itunes library, my edited one (it’s stripped down to only 3 playlists, just in case the large playlists were causing problems) and my PC’s original. I switched back to not using the file://localhost, playlists no longer show again
I still get a lot of “ERROR - UrlToFile: invalid url” in the logs, no idea what needs done to fix the files it’s having problems with though.
Within the Key node? Pretty sure those nodes define the name of the following string, I’m sure that’s part of every itunes library XML file http://i.imgur.com/5OGMBgP.png
Heh don’t worry about silly question, anything could find the problem at this point. But yeah, there’s a premium plex music library in there that works fine, all music from the Music share shows up and plays fine.
Ooof, well, maybe to make it a bit easier I’ll start by wiping my library in Plex, create a new share with just a few songs in it and a new small playlist, and test to see if I can get that working. I really just wish Plex had .m3u support, every other music media player has this, it’s so silly that Plex is missing it. It seems like integrating with an itunes library XML would’ve been a much more complex development enterprise than a playlist file that’s literally just a list of songs.
That’s kinda what I meant yeah, start with a new blank share and go from there with minimal music/playlists. Wipe library I just meant the Plex music library, start that part over. Thanks for trying!
Honestly, I don’t mean this in a mean way, but I think you’re wrong about file:/// being strictly a windows file structure thing. That’s the ONLY way I can get any of these playlists to show up at all.
The playlists always play fine in the web interface no matter what, but I really think both the Plex Media Player and Plex Home Theater just cannot support playlists with a large number of files. At least, not over a network. I’m pretty sure what’s happening is that both applications just time out when trying to load them. I’ve tested this out by trimming down the playlists significantly and then they play fine in the Media Player application. This theory makes a lot more sense when considering the web version always works fine.
Unfortunately this still makes Plex’s music features worthless for me if it just breaks on playlists with a few hundred songs… I’ve been hoping for years now that they’ll improve, I love everything else about Plex. Guess I’ll just have to keep checking back every few months, and in the meantime continue to use other music players.
J River works fantastic for this sort of thing, I was just really hoping to use Plex’s music video feature. Which, BTW, I guess doesn’t work with playlists… I couldn’t find a way to make that happen at all.
