Just trying to get some clarity here before I waste any more time carefully building and curating playlists in plex.
I had a bunch of playlists that I had carefully assembled and realized recently they had gotten MUCH shorter and a ton of songs had just disappeared.
I have not moved media on disk or migrated plex library/db or anything like that. All my media is on a thunderbolt attached drobo (ie external drive) but it is normally always connected to always-on plex media server. Occasionally the drive will glitch and disconnect and powerdown.
I’m guessing that Plex is “helpfully” removing all media from all my playlists that it can’t find anymore due to this temporary glitch?
Is this really the default behaviour for playlists? I’ve turned the “Empty trash automatically after every scan” setting OFF now under server settings > Library. However I would like to be able to re-organize my library on disk periodically and have plex be intelligent about recognizing the media is still there, just moved…and this should work without destroying playlists I have created manually.
I get it, sort of… I mean if you delete music from your library then plex can’t play it…and plex can’t tell the difference between a temporary missing drive and a permanent missing drive. However even the local (downloaded/synced) playlist on my phone…where the media IS still present was also updated to remove those songs.
This user experience sucks for users because we make a lot of effort to build our playlists and then have plex randomly edit them for us is infuriating. I don’t know exactly when this happened but I always keep my plex server up to date and it definitely happened in the last 6 month to multiple playlists. I use PMS on macos, webapp player, plexamp desktop, plexamp android and plex android.
Normally when a drive is disconnected (e.g. maintenance), plex still shows all items and says “media not available” or something like that indicating it is still in the library but the media file is not accessible at the moment (e.g. unplugged drive). i.e. shouldn’t be getting deleted from playlists right?
I thought the above was “soft deleting” but maybe there is some other plex differentiation between missing drive and folder is there but item isn’t?
In any case, because playlists are manually created by users with a lot of effort, I would expect the following…
- plex never modifies playlists automatically.
- if a media item in the playlist can’t be found, plex visually marks it as such (just like when I try to play a movie on a drive that is disconnected…media not available) and just skips it during playback. If on mobile device with local/synced/downloaded content where media IS present, then it will still play.
- plex can offer the user to switch to an alternate version(s)/copy of the specific track if multiple copies were found in the library (ie duplicated music album).
- otherwise it is up to the user to manually delete/replace/etc these items from their playlists.
This way a user has a guarantee that plex won’t automatically destroy their hard work (playlist construction). This is so annoying, I won’t use the playlist feature in plex anymore until there is a solution. Apparently all my effort will sooner or later be erased by plex without notice. If there was a playlist backup/restore mechanism then maybe I’d still use playlists and just make a backup every time I edit it to protect me from plex misbehaving.
Anyone out there have a solution for this other than: “don’t use plex for music?”
