I posted here about my problem with playlists created for artist; at present if I search for, say, ‘Divine Comedy’ (artist) and then add a playlist (it will be a smart playlist at this point – any further albums I add with the artist ‘Divine Comedy’ will be auto added to the playlist) the resulting playlist will show the songs ordered by track name rather than grouped together for each album and then in the order the tracks appear on that album.
@MovieFan.Plex said:
Playlists should list the songs in the order they were added to the list. Currently, there is no way to automatically resort the list. You can manually move songs around one at a time.
This is not really true as the tracks are added as per plex determines currently: track name; the ONLY way to get the tracks grouped into album in the artist playlist is to NOT have a smart playlist. So, when I search for ‘Divine Comedy’, rather than add a playlist at that point I must click on the artist ‘Divine Comedy’ which gives a list of Albums and then from here add a playlist. This is not ideal because the playlist is not then smart and the playlist will not update with new albums from Divine Comedy if they are added.
So, why is it a smart playlist based on an artist search cannot be presented in the correct order:
Tracks grouped by Albums
Tracks in correct order with each Album
I really think this is a Bug, as who would want an Artist playlist with tracks not grouped by their respective albums but ordered by track name, whereby the following song might be a track from an unrelated album.
When you import your music from iTunes, does it create a “Playlist” or a “Smart Playlist?” I don’t use iTunes, so I don’t know. The UI doesn’t say “Smart Playlists.” I ask because what MovieFan told you is true if it is not a Smart Playlist.
I tried to reproduce what you did, and I got different results. I did the following:
From the Plex home page, I searched for ‘Enya.’ This gave me one listing for that artist.
On the Artist tile, I clicked the ‘…’ menu and selected ‘Add to playlist…’. I named the playlist and clicked ADD.
The playlist was displayed. It is not a Smart Playlist. It is ordered by album, and the tracks for each album are in the correct order. The albums are in the reverse order than I expected, but that’s not so bad.
This all may be irrelevant, since I’m adding from my own files, and you’re importing from iTunes. I wonder if it could have something to do with the way iTunes manages the embedded metadata?
Doesn’t matter if its a smart playlist from iTunes or one created in plex
server. It doesn’t say ‘smart’ but there is a cog in corner, which is how
you tell if it is smart in plex. You can reproduce by not clicking on the
artist (the results from the search) but creating a playlist directly after
your search query for enya: don’t click on artist but just create playlist,
then you get a smart playlist rather than a nondynamic one.
It was useful when artist where spread across compilations, but then plex
does not search using artist tag for individual tags, but that is a whole
other problem.
Youd agree though that the ordering is rather useless and is more of a bug
than feature?
Do you listen to enya much? :0p I had a fling with someone who rather like
her too much. Relationship didn’t last long.
Sorry. My statement was meant for a regular Playlist. I did not realize you were referring to smart playlists. You are correct that for smart playlist, there is no sorting going on, or it is using some odd sorting method that is not obvious. I will go ahead and file this as a bug. Thank you for the report.
Digging further into this issue, it might not actually be a bug. It is a bug, but only because it’s not intended to work that way.
Right now searching for an artist will just return the 1 entry for that artist. So the criteria for the smart playlist is artist=“search criteria”. So the result is correct. You cannot specify other parameters so the list is just random.
Since this result will just be 1 artist, there is no need to generate a smart playlist for the artist. You can just hit play at the artist level, which will play all track in order sorted by the album, which is exactly what you were trying to accomplish with the smart playlist. Any albums you add will also get included. If/When the search is changed to return the individual tracks based on artist, I’m sure the sorting can be worked out properly then.
@anon18523487 said:
Digging further into this issue, it might not actually be a bug. It is a bug, but only because it’s not intended to work that way.
Right now searching for an artist will just return the 1 entry for that artist. So the criteria for the smart playlist is artist=“search criteria”. So the result is correct. You cannot specify other parameters so the list is just random.
Since this result will just be 1 artist, there is no need to generate a smart playlist for the artist. You can just hit play at the artist level, which will play all track in order sorted by the album, which is exactly what you were trying to accomplish with the smart playlist. Any albums you add will also get included. If/When the search is changed to return the individual tracks based on artist, I’m sure the sorting can be worked out properly then.
With iTunes, a smart playlist for artist is useful because it brings in all tracks (grouped album-wise) for that artist, so artists in compilations (those ‘Various artists’ albums) are included in the playlist. Also, it is sometimes more convenient sometimes to navigate to a playlist to shuffle etc. But despite all this, the current ordering is quite useless as it stand for the smart playlist, thus I do consider it a bug because it does not serve well. of course, as you say, search will need to be changed to return individual tracks based on artist; I’ll quote your reply in the discussion on that as it might prove useful to others.
As to the ‘If/When’, @chrisallen has said the search would be changed to return the individual tracks based on artist.
I understand. Plex’s playlist feature just doesn’t work that way right now. The results are not what you expect, and to call that a bug versus not being a feature, it’s just semantics. However, to get the behavior you want, it is probably better to make a feature request to be able to search track artist or to return associated albums and tracks when searching for an artist. Getting support for a feature request will motivate the devs more than a bug report. Especially when the bug is due to a not as designed aspect.
