I have seen several discussions regarding .m3u files, but most are outdated with the advent of the playlist feature in Plex. The Plex playlist feature is nice for most purposes, but I’d like to make the case for supporting .m3u playlists.
Classical music is the best example of the need for this, I think. Symphonies generally include 3 to 5 movements, and each movement is generally a separate file.
Now let’s say I want to create a playlist containing several symphonies by various composers. Currently I can add all the files for all the movements for all the symphonies to a playlist, and I can play them in order. But if I want to randomly play this playlist, but keep each symphony together and in order, I can’t do it. In the current feature, random playback would randomly play individual movements.
If, however, I could build my playlist by picking each symphony as a single piece (defined by an m3u file), random playback could do what I want. Randomly play complete, intact symphonies, without randomizing the movements within each symphony.
I literally just started another feature request for the very same thing but my use case is different. I'll paste the feature request here so the developers can see it in both places.
The current playlist feature does not work for those of us who host Plex on our NAS devices. It also would benefit users who host Plex on their desktop machines and use other audio programs where they can export their current playlists into .m3u standardized files.
The major missing feature is an ability to import from .m3u playlist files on the Plex server.
In the case of a NAS user, we can export a playlist file from a desktop machine, edit the .m3u file directly to change the path of the MP3 files from referencing local drive letter mappings with absolute paths to the relative path on the NAS where the music files are located and then import that playlist into Plex on the NAS.
Right now the only option available to build a playlist is literally trying to build playlists one song at a time and manually going through your music library which is extremely cumbersome.
Please add this much needed feature.
Hey guys. There is already a request for this feature so i am going to close this one in favor of the other to avoid splitting votes.
https://forums.plex.tv/topic/117633-option-to-use-existing-m3u-for-playlist-feature/
