Hi Tom, I’ve been compiling a number of playlists for many years. Yesterday, I noticed that most of them suddenly added random songs and now 239,200, completely messing them up!
I spend years on these. What are my options just to get them back to where they were yesterday morning? Do I need to revert my computer back?
If you’re not sure, please forward this to someone that would know.
Thanks!
I take it those aren’t smart playlists (to the best of my knowledge the Android client will also show the gear overlay for those)?
If you’ve automatic database backups enabled, you might be able to restore an older version of the database.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/202485658-restore-a-database-backed-up-via-scheduled-tasks/
Independent from that it might be worth to have a look how they got messed up like this?
I’m not aware of any large-scale issues of that kind with playlists. Any chance you “pocket dialed” those playlists (somehow selecting a mass of items and adding them to those playlists)?
Here’s what I think happened. I wanted to add a song and didn’t see “Add to playlist” in the normal position when i clicked on the lower 3 dots, so I thought maybe you guys moved it. I clicked the lower right hamburger and then on the very top, just to the left of CLEAR, I clicked that hamburger and saw “Add to playlist”. I did this 5-8 times until I noticed that my lists got out of whack.
This was my doing.
I also noticed that my playlists are still in the order of how they got added, so since the real lists range from the 400’s to 4500, it might be my best bet to somehow check all of them, uncheck what should be there and delete the rest. I’m not sure exactly how I should do this.
I attempted this and its easy to scroll thru using my scroll on my mouse, click one with the shift button and do bunches at a time. These get lost if I use the side bar maybe because there’s so many.
Hopefully, you understand what I’m saying. This solution is painful and not ideal. Do you have any ideas how I can delete these more efficiently?
Multi-selecting and deleting the records is the way to go solution short of restoring a backup.
Is there a more efficient way to delete songs other than what I described? Any good hacks?
I can’t figure out how to select all, then unselect the ones I want to keep and delete the rest
Nope.
I really see no other way than deleting one at a time, which is crazy
Didn’t we just establish that you can multi-select and then delete the items (as per your own post)?
The only downside is that you’ll need to scroll through the entire playlist… with 290k items to delete, you’ll probably want to take several sections to avoid getting to the end of the list just to figure out that you skipped some part and therefore cannot select the full range.
I can’t select ALL, but I can select multiple, but it looks as though when I do that and click the upper hamburger button, they delete one by one, very slowly…
Just making sure there is no better way…
I just tried about 40 at a time and the load just gets stuck. This just isn’t a solution
Knowing the first X songs that used to make up the original playlist… would it be easier to create a new copy?
Yes. It might. I can create “Rock 2” for example, but what would be the most efficient way to bulk copy into the newly created playlists?
Any idea?
IMHO, you are way better off by restoring a database backup.
I’m just not sure I’ll be able to do it. I know I can restore my media drives, but I doubt the Plex database is included, which is why I’m trying to come up with another way. The features I mentioned would be great if you had them, but it doesn’t sound like you do.
These backups are explicitly just the database. They are already done for you, you just need to rename a few files to restore an earlier snapshot.
Ok I’m just not sure how this would be done. I’m not a techy. I messaged my computer guy, but are you able to spell out the process for me like I’m 5?
It’s all in the link above.
