The current playlist feature does not work for those of us who host Plex on our NAS devices. What we need is an ability to import from .m3u playlist files on the Plex server. This way we can export a playlist file from a desktop machine that is using iTunes, edit the file directly to change the path of the MP3 files from 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.
Can we get this feature on the request list. It shouldn't be hard to add.
This way we can export a playlist file from a desktop machine that is using iTunes, edit the file directly to change the path of the MP3 files from 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.
Hum, not sure every NAS user needs this. Most of us (i think) actually dont use iTunes and you can just put your music on your NAS. I mean, isnt the whole point of a NAS to centralize media for a personal use ? Hell you can even use iTunes with NAS stored music, you just have to keep the library files themsleves client-side.
Thanks Trumpy81. Your response was exactly what I would have written as well. My mistake was mentioning iTunes with regard to the .m3u request. This request has nothing to do with iTunes as you mention .m3u is a standard and used by most if not all audio/mp3 clients.
PlexMeteor - to your point, all of my MP3s are in hosted on my NAS and I point any/all clients to the NAS off of network drive mappings which works fine. In the case where we have Plex running directly on the NAS, we need a way to create/import playlists. For people running Plex on Windows or MacOS PC's they can import through iTunes playlists with the current features. We cannot do that as iTunes does not run directly on the NAS.
I'm not sure where we are supposed to post feature requests for Plex. It seems it would be great if Plex had a database of user requests that could be filled out rather than trying to start random threads in the forums.
@tetraploid i understand now. BTW, there is a dedicated "feature & bug voting" subforum in the PlexPass section. You can propose your idea there in a synthetic (but precise) way and plexpass members may vote for it. While there is no strict rule about suggestions being considered/accepted, Plex team will definitely read it and consider its approval among paid users.
If you are serious about this thing you should do it ; i did so myself to push avoton support (DSx15+) and it definitely speeded up the process _ if not made it happen.
I second this request. Running into the exact same issue. I am using QNAP to store all my media. It’s so cumbersome to select one file at a time to create a playlist. In fact, I also want a iTunes like ‘smart playlist’ that creates an auto playlist on the fly with the user defined criteria such as artist, ratings, year etc.
I also need this. There really needs to be some way for users that already have a large library of music imported into Plex to import the playlists they’ve created. Currently we’re required to re-create the playlist from scratch.
I’m adding another vote for a M3U playlist recognition as well.
Reasons:
I don’t use iTunes, and I don’t want to convert my playlists between different platforms when the M3U standard works.
Both the built in audio player on my Synology and my phone’s music playing app is smart enough to recognize a M3U file. When the app sees a M3U file, a playlist is presented to me. I rather keep my playlists in M3U files, because I know it’ll work for all future platforms. I don’t see why this can’t be done with Plex. M3U is just a simple text file of names. I’m stuck with hand adding Plex music playlist one by one, and that is a waste of time. Currently Plex is not a good music player for this reason.
The ability to created smart playlist a la iTunes is requested as well. I can tag my songs’s ID3 with specific keywords or multiple [names of playlist]. Some of the songs belong to more than one playlists. I currently use an app that reads the ID3 tag and present the smart playlist for me based on my criteria. While it works, it is a feature that I would like to see in Plex. Else, Plex for me is a terrible music player.
I don’t have a NAS but this is the only reason I still hold on to JRiver Media Center. Plex takes way too long to index the content in my music folders when I add or delete new artists and has limited playlist import support (a playlist with ~1000 songs cannot be imported). I’ve tried Musicfans’ database tool, which is very nice but it’s limited by the Plex database setup. Also, creating playlists within Plex with a large music library is a very daunting task since importing doesn’t work.
It seems to me that music management was secondary when Plex was created.
I am so surprised that Plex doesn’t automatically import my playlists from the .m3u files on my hard drive! This is my one hang-up with Plex as I’ve invested so much already into forming playlists with winamp, and recreating these playlists by hand would take tons of time. iTunes imports .m3u playlists, why can’t Plex?
This is a selling point for anyone who comes to the Plex Party with a bunch of .m3u playlists; many of those have been carefully curated and would be a PITA to re-do.
This is a simple example I’m up against, but it can’t be done (easily) with Plex; but, I have an existing .m3u file made with FooBar2000 that I could import (it’s also easy to re-create or update there):
I have songs of a particular genre (OK…Christmas) that are all in a single top-level folder; they’re also all marked with the Christmas genre. However, I can’t build a playlist using just genre, as it only finds “album genre” (wha?) or “artist genra” (wha 2?), you can’t query for a genra across all songs, or even all songs in a folder. You can use the folder view, but only if you go down to the level that has albums in it (seems to be very album-centric). Which means you miss all the “no album” songs. Maybe if I moved them into a fake album folder and said they were all in that album, but geez…horrible.
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