Smart Playlist Ratings should handle half stars, or offer greater/less than *or equal to*

[brianbillman]

This is primarily related to Music, but I assume it’s applicable to video as well…

Plex Server version (Synology) = 1.19.4.2935
Plex Web version = 4.36.1

There are multiple Plex clients that can rate in half star increments (Plex on iOS, Plexamp on iOS & Mac are the ones I know about). In the Plex Web client, you can create smart playlists with ratings for Artists, Albums, and Tracks. However, there are issues when trying to filter items rated with half stars. The current UI only lets you choose [ Is, Is Not, Greater Than, Less Than ] with [ 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ] stars. For example, suppose I have a track rated at 3.5 stars, and I want to make a smart playlist that has all tracks with a rating of 3 or higher. So I make a smart playlist that has the criteria of “Track Rating Greater Than 3”, but it only includes whole numbers (ratings of 4 or 5, not 3.5). And because criteria that involve Ratings can only be ANDed together, there’s no way to indicate “Track Rating Greater Than 3 OR Track Rating Is 3”.

A couple ways this could be solved:

1. Add new rating criteria operations for “Less Than or Equal To” and “Greater Than or Equal To”

2. Change behavior of existing rating criteria operations such that half ratings are included (so that >3 includes 3.5, 4, 4.5, 5); and likewise for less than. This seems to be a bug?

3. Ideally made as part of #2, but allow selection of half ratings within Plex Web, so it’s consistent with the Plex clients.

I kept feeling like that I’m missing something obvious here (please correct me if I’m wrong or there’s another way to handle this!), but after trying several scenarios, what I ended up doing to removing all half star ratings (I had just started rating music), but that seems problematic, unless there was a server switch to disable half-ratings completely, so that in the clients that currently support it, its no long possible to add one.

Thanks!

[redskypinksand]

I think the issue that comes up here is that the font used for the web UI does not have half stars. @elan will know better than I do, though. Ideally, a similar font with half stars could be found, or maybe someone could even get into contact with the font creator and very kindly request half stars.

[brianbillman]

I’m not sure that’s the case, as there’s still only 6 distinct options listed in the drop down (0-5 in increments of 1, instead of 11 options). If the font was the only issue, they could just change it to a number instead of the glyph. My guess is that the half star ratings were possibly added in later, and the UI & filter logic hasn’t been fully updated to accommodate.

[santhori]

+1 for this

I want to make a smart playlist with tracks from albums with album rating 3 or higher. Maybe I’m slow but I can’t find a way to do that… If I choose “is greater than” 3 stars, I only get tracks from albums rated 3.5, 4, 4.5 and 5, NOT the 3 stars ones.