"There are no playlists on this server"....except there are.

General Discussions
1

I can only add an item to a playlist by creating a new playlist for it, otherwise I get the message shown in my question. How can I fix this ?
I’m on Mac.

2

Situations when I have seen this occur:

  1. Trying to add an item to the wrong type of playlist (trying to add a movie, but all your playlists are music playlists, for example).
  2. All of my playlists are smart playlists (smart playlists are populated solely according to the configured filter. You can’t manually add to them).

Is it possible that one of those situations apply?

3

Hi tx for the help !

  1. The situation I’m in is: I have two movie libraries, both made using “movies” as type, and I want to make an “all movies” playlist. When I try to add a movie to a playlist I can only choose the option to make a new playlist. When I try to add the entire library from the side panel it says “There are no playlists on this server”.
  2. I have no idea how to make or unmake a smart pl.
4

Ok it worked adding them to the playlist from mobile devices, but then I discovered you can only see the items in list view and you can’t sort them. Playlists are a mess. Thank you for your time anyway.

5

If you are creating your playlist like this:

4wfxved20x78.jpg596×539 109 KB

You are creating a smart playlist. You can tell a smart from a regular playlist by the “gear” icon overlaying the playlist

u839leswc9oh.jpg723×276 93.4 KB

The advantage of a smart playlist in this case is, if you add more movies to your library, they will automatically be added to the playlist. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that Plex is designed to let you create smart playlists with items from multiple libraries.

In order to create a standard (non-smart) playlist, do the following:

  1. In your first Movie library, hold the shift key and click the first movie. A checkmark should appear on the poster.
  2. Still holding the Shift key, click the last movie in the library. All movies should now have the checkmark.
  3. Click the ‘Add to Playlist’ icon in the left sidebar.
  4. Name the playlist and save it.
  5. Go to the other movie library and repeat steps 1 - 3. The playlist you just created should appear, and you can add the movies from the second library to it.

The disadvantage here is that you will have to manually add future movies to the playlist, since it isn’t “smart.”

6

@bcdserra said:
Ok it worked adding them to the playlist from mobile devices, but then I discovered you can only see the items in list view and you can’t sort them. Playlists are a mess. Thank you for your time anyway.

Playlists are a relatively new feature in Plex, so it’s essentially a “version 1.” I don’t think there have been any major updates to the playlist feature since its introduction. Definitely some work to do, but it’s a pretty good start, in my opinion.