And doing my ‘once in a blue moon’ check-in regarding sorting of playlists, I see elan believes that only a few really want the ability to sort playlists. The ability to manage a playlist is null when you can’t sort it. Sorting allows you to easily locate duplicate tracks as well as tracks that may not belong in a specific playlist. I agree with stack_overflow. If you can’t sort the content of a playlist, you cannot manage your playlists.
3 Likes
Circling back to this again. And with the recent announcement that PlexAmp will be available to non PlexPass users, I’m afraid many folks are about to have a very rude awakening to this lack of a VERY basic feature of any music app. I’m pretty sure even WinAmp could do this…
2 Likes
Came to the feature suggestions for this exact issue. It’s so annoying not being able to do playlist sorting such as Artist, Album, and Title. I would love to transfer off Spotify and use my Plex Server for music, but transitioning my playlists to Plex is so tedious without the ability to customize my sorting. Was shocked to see that this has been pending for 8 years now. Seems so basic.
2 Likes
Nobody’s talking about yesterday, they’re talking about decades ago. Search your forums for “playlist management” and have a read. The only thing more neglected than your basic features are your forums. I don’t even bother to post feature requests or bug reports because the majority of posts are closed due to no activity after a certain number of days, with no response from the team. We’re tired of yelling into the wind for literal years. There’s zero transparency and very low comms.
Have you ever actually used playlists for music? Do me a favor and make yourself a music playlist with a couple hundred songs. Now go add 5 more songs, but make them the 3rd-7th songs. Honestly, I can’t believe anyone at Plex actually uses Plex because there are plenty of pain points I’ve run into that I would have said “wow that affects basic usability, that HAS to be fixed”.
I can sort a list of songs with either VLC Media Player or Windows Explorer but cannot with Plex.
3 Likes
You’re not only obnoxious, but incorrect.
We’re actively looking to add more features to playlists per this request and others.
1 Like
It’s great to hear you’re actively looking to add more features to playlists. Did I come across as obnoxious? Honestly, being obnoxious but acknowledged is a step up from being completely ignored for years on end. Are you seriously in an 8 year old thread telling me you’re “actively looking to add more features to playlists” and do you not realize how patronizing that sounds? I sincerely come here a couple times a year to check on a laundry list of items and find no progress or comms on anything, just a forum filled with closed topics. Features implemented, but not tested, broken in certain use cases, reported as bugged, acknowledged as a problem by Plex staff, reproduced even, but then no comms ever again.
I’ve had what I felt was a pleasant attitude prior. I gave sufficient details, suggestions with mockup images. Always felt lucky if a staff member even saw it and acknowledged it. Ecstatic if I got a bugfix a year later.
How can you sincerely look around these forums and not see people talking about being completely ignored?
I actually remember when Plex moved to this forum software and it felt like a huge step back. It’s a jumbled mess and it feels like nothing is being tracked. Maybe you have a slick bug tracker internally, but the feedback to users is sorely lacking. Are you tracking what forum threads reported what internally tracked bugs, and updating them appropriately? Do you have a way to merge suggestion threads or bug report threads if they’re for the same thing?
Every time I run into a bug or problem I’m trying to work out I come to these forums and run a search and sure enough there’s a bunch of threads where a user had the same problem, posted about it, no replies (or maybe other members saying “yeah they don’t care”), then it was closed by your forum software, so the next people all make their own threads with no replies. A lot of the problems I’ve had I don’t even bother to post because it’s so demoralizing seeing so many closed topics about the same thing with no intention to fix.
So yeah in case you didn’t get the memo managed users have been left by the wayside. I’m currently migrating my kids and wife to their own external users because several features simply were not implemented to take into account managed users and they break. Of course then I run into fun problems like how Plex has no playlist management and I cannot export/copy playlists from the managed users to external users so I get to recreate all the playlists manually.
Have a great night and thanks for the response.
1 Like
Here I wrote a simple Python script using the fantastic pkkid/python-plexapi to copy a playlist from one user to another.
Their API wrapper even has a “copy” function, but it was failing for me and seemed like your API really doesn’t like Managed Users.
It had been long enough since I wrote any Python that my Debian VM was on version 10 and it didn’t enjoy being upgraded, so I hacked this together and slapped it on my Unraid box. Even getting sidetracked with my VM and forgetting most of what I knew about Python I got this done in a day while doing my full time job.
All I did was:
- grabbed my auth tokens for my managed user that already has the playlist and my main admin user I wanted to copy my playlist to
- created a PlexServer instance for each one
- grabbed the correct playlist from the source user
- created a new playlist with the same name using the same items on the destination user
Bam playlist is copied and music plays.
Could you actively look at adding a simple dialog to the web UI to recreate this?
Been almost 30 days. Just checking in again… would LOVE to recommend PlexAMP to so many friends now that it’s available without a Plex Pass but I just can’t until this VERY VERY basic feature is usable…
I cringe every time I add tracks to the handful of my playlists, knowing they’ll eventually get lost in the ether and I’ll have no way of easily moving them in place with the songs by that artist. As @myauch mentions a few posts above, sure you can drag up songs but only for small playlists; try doing that with hundreds of songs and the GUI just can’t handle it.
It’s on our list. But I’m pretty sure it’s useful to your friends without it, as all our existing users would attest to.
Look, I switched from Spotify to Plexamp about 2 years ago, but it was very difficult due to this Playlist issue. I already began the process when I ran into the issue and spent TONS of time trying to figure out what I was missing as to why I couldn’t get to sort (server version, only available on X client, etc). Then realized it just wasn’t available and then spent the next months after looking for a workaround.
I’m glad it’s on the list, and I hope it exceeds my expectations.
Guest DJ and Radio Mixes are great and all, but I would have rather had this basic feature much sooner and certainly before those features.
1 Like
Just here to ask for this, I have been creating some video playlists that have both movies and TV shows and it would be great to add them to a playlist and have them automatically sort via release date/air date.
At the moment on a long list it’s pretty painful moving something from the bottom to where it needs to go.
2 Likes
Been a couple updates since this. Your view on music listeners is quite inaccurate. If you want to appeal to the music crowd you must meet a few basic needs that are not currently met. Sorting within playlists is one. Removing time cap limit on downloaded playlists is another. Stop pushing “smart playlists” because the music listeners out to utilize plexamp are smarter than your “smart playlists” as we create our own based on our own needs and wants. These two things are pretty easy to implement if your dev team didn’t try to shove inane features down our throats. So stop being condescending to your audience.
Additionally, still no ability to sort within playlists. Android app added filtering, but that’s not what was being asked for. Do you need a proper music enthusiast on your app dev team? You clearly don’t have one if you still lack basic features.
Such a sweet attitude, really inspiring.
Only following your lead from your attitude toward the rest of your customers in this thread.
1 Like
I have to agree with this sentiment. The attitude from staff has been snarky and condescending.
Not asking for a severely complex feature here. Not asking to search for every song that was ever made on every platform (now that Plex can do that with Movies and TV shows). Not asking for any AI feature, smart list, radio, etc. They are nice features that I can certainly live without. The smart lists only go so far for someone with a limited music collection.
But as pointed out by myself and others above: many of us would like to build large static playlists but editing those playlists is insufferable if you want to group a new song by an artist up with all of that artist’s other songs. It’s not even so much sorting to PLAY as much as it’s the ability to sort to ORGANIZE and to see what is on that playlist and what isn’t. Scrolling through a 500 song playlist to see if you had remembered to add a song is frustrating when any other music app would allow you to sort by artist to then only have to scroll through a handful or few dozen songs instead of hundreds.
So what features for music are higher on this voting list?
“Support for audiobooks”. I can understand that request but even that sounds more complicated to implement than what we are asking for.
“Better Playlists” which is broad though if I recall from reading this topic, it involves more movies and tv shows than music. But it does make mention of playlist sorting by release date.
“Playback speed” Again requests appears to be aimed at webcam with highlights of audiobook
“Tag support for ROBUST music library organization” I fully support this as well and will be throwing my weight behind it once the feature we are discussing is implemented because I know that a robust tagging system would take longer than this basic feature!
“Better support for albums and tracks with multiple artists” and this would of course go hand in hand with ROBUST tagging and be more difficult to implement.
“CUE support for FLAC files” though I’m a FLAC audiophile I can see the limited need for this but it does seem like a simple feature that has also been requested since 2015.
“Lyrics always visible when song starts” another simple feature requested since 2016.
“Multichannel FLAC and high resolution audio support for music in NVIDIA Shield Plex app” A niche audiophile request but one that probably should exist.
“Support for Apple Spatial Audio” can’t speak to this one
“Option to use existing m3u for playlist feature” kinda the same as a CUE; a bit niche though not as much as the CUE
“Playlists - Remember position for subsequent resume” though directed toward Movies/Shows this would have it’s place with music playlists as well and would be nice
“Music tracks need genre” agree with this as well though it’s covered if ROBUST tagging gets implemented.
“Download entire library or playlist in Plexamp” they want to be able to download more than 24 hours to their large capacity phones
Which finally brings us to our simple request: “Playlist sorting and searching feature request”. A request since Sept 2015, long before Tidal. Long before ad-TV/Movies. Long before Arcade. And people are asking for much more complicated items than this.
2 Likes
I wonder if this was brought up in the Fireside chat
Pending a positive reply that this is at the top of the list for implementation in next release
Happy Friday! Sad to report, sorting within playlists is STILL not implemented in PlexAmp or even PlexWeb. Despite the metadata and implementation for this feature request being present in PlexWeb when viewing all tracks. Are we gonna go for 9 years of this being ignored?
This should be at the top of the docket for next implementation. I, and the rest of the music enthusiast community that would love to use your product, are very disappointed in your attitude and treatment of our request.
3 Likes
I think you’re confused, you can sort All Tracks (or any library filter) inside Plexamp as well. You cannot sort playlists anywhere because it requires server support.
