+1 to this! Plexamp was recently on twitter asking for playlist management use cases, so this feels like as good a place as any to share some of my own.
My biggest feature requests regarding playlists:
- Additional sorting methods
- Captured timestamps for “when added” or “last listened”
- Playlist folders
- Greyed out entries for missing/moved files
- Search within playlists / lookup songs by “included in playlist”
I’m someone who makes a lot of personal mixtapes, like maybe 5 to 10 a year just for myself. I also make
playlists for other people pretty regularly. As a result, I have 100+ playlists that I’ve meticulously curated over the years. Playlist folders (FR3) would be an amazing QoL improvement for the platform for me just in terms of being able to find a specific playlist more easily.
Playlists are the primary way I listen to music. My music library spans something like 20k files, so when I hear a song that clicks with me, I add it to a big “staging playlist” of potential mixtape songs, currently somewhere in the 1500 songs range. Without sorting methods (FR1) or even just some metadata timestamps (FR2), this playlist is pretty much impossible to manage.
Once I add a song to a mixtape, I like to remove it from the staging playlist so that I don’t reuse it on another mixtape too soon. Without some additional sorting controls (FR1 + FR2), I have to manually scan the playlist to find songs and remove them. There’s no easy way to do this as far as I can tell, especially since the dynamic lazy-load on the web interface makes it so that you can’t even use in-browser text searching to accomplish this. Some way of searching in playlists or bringing up a little song-level UI like “this song is included in the following playlists…” (FR5) would be amazing for me specifically.
And lastly, as far as I can tell, Plex doesn’t have a mechanism for maintaining “this song/file moved locations” across the library, which is useful if you use an tool or program to automatically manage your music’s metadata and storage locations. Doesn’t happen often, but sometimes artist or album names (especially for indie artists) will change slightly. When this happens and the file is moved to a new location in the library, the original song is just removed from any playlist it was on, with no record that it used to be there (FR4). This was a real pain when I first imported my 100+ playlists after running all of the music through a tagging program and I had to manually scan all of the playlists to see if anything was missing. A niche problem to be sure, but still another great QoL for playlist management.
Hope that’s good context! If it helps, I used to manage my music through iTunes, which is probably where a lot of these requests are coming from. If Plex/Plexamp had just a tiny bit more playlist management options, it would truly be a perfect platform for my playlist-centric use cases.
And apologies for co-opting this thread a little bit. 
