I’m surprised to see Plex touted as an iTunes replacement: https://www.plex.tv/ad/itunes-replacement/
I have found Plex’s playlists sorely lacking compared to iTunes’s smart playlists, especially because there are big gaps in what tags are available on a track-by-track basis.
Do you have a suggestion for how to make the transition? I in particular need to be able to use track genres and groupings (for tagging) somehow.
Plex is a great music media player, but it is not an iTunes replacement at this point yet. Hopefully the devs are continuing to add features that will allow Plex’ smart playlists to be more versatile, or even manageable to a point. Right now Plex’ smart playlists are built by the filters you place onto your music library. Once you create that playlist, the playlist itself cannot be changed. It can only be recreated. The playlists do work as intended though. I have a playlist that includes all tracks added in the last two weeks that have a play count of zero. Not sure when the play count is added to the track, but I am having good success not hearing the same song twice.
To answer your question, I am not exactly sure what your objective is. Can you elaborate on what you are trying to accomplish so someone can assist with the creation of a smart playlist.
@PGalati, thanks for chiming in.
First, I need to be able to filter by track genre, not album. As far as I know, that’s not possible, but I would love to be proven wrong.
Second, I use iTunes’ “grouping” to add any number of tags. I would be very surprised for that to be supported, but would be open to a similar functionality, where I can add labels/tags to any track at any time, which would then drive smart playlist inclusion.
The best I can get right now is annoyingly manual. I create a standard playlist of each of my smart playlists in iTunes, then sync the XML file into Plex, and get the playlists available. It’s a pain, and depends on iTunes, which I’m completely open to doing away with if I could.
Have you looked Plex’ smart list capabilities? They have some decent flexibility that might get you part of the way there. From a individual track basis, I guess the only choices you have is star ratings and moods, but I don’t think moods are available on the mobile app, if that is important. Star ratings could potentially get you 5 workable playlists, each star represents a different genre, for example. Clunky I know, but it may get you your top 5 genres active or whatever. Star a song and it is added to a smart playlist looking for that number of stars. It seems the genre label is only available at the artist level whereas mood is track level. You could create your own mood labels. I created my own genre label and added it to artists so they were included in a playlist looking for my custom genre. I do like the fact that I can add a song to a regular playlist from the mobile app in Plex whereas iTunes required the computer to sync.
At this point I am only using iTunes for ripping and metadata management. I really do love the smart playlist capabilities of iTunes but this most recent user interface generation is not very good. I really miss the iTunes DJ playlist. I don’t know that the Apple Music app is going to be any better.
Sorry I really can’t be more help.
Plex has removed moods, genre, and collection tagging from tracks with a recent update. Smart playlists for music are essentially worthless now.
I totally agree! I’m new to Plex and find it very confusing.
Well that is quite unfortunate. Hopefully once their revamping is completed, those options will return. Fortunately they are still available at the artist level, but not track level.
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