Importing playlists and importing ratings into plex

 

I was recently asked again whether it is possible to import a playlist in .m3u format that exists outside of plex into plex. Also on a regular basis plex users ask whether it is possible to sync track ratings to plex. I have discussed those issues in my blog a while ago but it may be helpful to revisit them now.

Unfortunately, both is not possible out-of-the-box, but there are workarounds. I would like to describe one possible way here. 

Importing playlists

Let us start with importing playlists. Since plex is very picky, you have to proceed very carefully though. The success depends on a number of factors that may be different for each user. That is probably the reason why plex does not offer importing playlists in the first place. 

First of all, it depends on whether plex is running on a Windows or Linux device. In my case, plex runs on a Linux device. So take care that all paths, be it to the .m3u file or  those in the .m3u itself to the .mp3-files comply with Linux conventions. Change the root and any backslashes if you are working in a windows environment for example with the editor. 

Secondly,  I am assuming that the tracks are already in the Plex database and are located at the place mentioned in the m3u. If this is not the case, plex cannot recognize the tracks of course. 

Thirdly, make sure that your .m3u is located somewhere within the folder structure of the Plex library you want the playlist to be added to. If this is not the case, plex cannot see the m3u. 

Now you can use either a curl command or a python script (to be found on github) to import the playlist. I recently tested jaylex32's 's Syncra and it worked well (just make sure that the path to the .m3u is correct, if you are running the .exe on a windows machine. It'll give you a path to the file in windows format and that won't work for a plex server on a linux machine.  

As it may take a while for larger playlists to appear in plex, you may want to reload the playlist view in the web view. 

Importing track ratings

If you want to sync track ratings from the outside world into plex, your first step would be to create one playlist for each rating value, for example one playlist for all your tracks with a Five-Star-Rating. With this playlist, follow the steps to import the playlist to plex. 

As soon as you can see the new playlist, convert it to a collection. You may want to use Casvt's "playlist_to_collection" script for that which is also on github. Once you have the collection, you can tag all the tracks with the rating of your choice. 

Sonic Adventure: How to save it as a playlist and more

 

One of the best features of plex and plexamp is the ability to create a smooth audio journey starting with one track and ending with another after an hour or so. You need a server which is able to do a sonic analysis of the tracks in your library and a plex pass to enjoy the feature. 

If you are happy with the journey, you may want to save the track sequence for later which you can do in plexamp by hitting the three dots at the bottom and save the queue as a playlist. 

Or you can create such a playlist right on the server by using a bit of python. This could prove useful, for example, if the two endpoint-tracks are to be determined by certain criteria, such as their genres, certain moods or the date they were added to the library. Here is a link to a script where the user enters the titles of the start and end tracks and has the opportunity to apply filters such as the user rating, the play count or the track genre. Keep in mind that these filters will shorten the resulting playlist, so the outcome very much depends on the size of your library and the filters you apply. If you want the original length of the playlist, leave all filters simply blank. 

How can I sort the albums in a plex music library in all artist views by regular albums, live albums and compilations in just a few minutes?

 

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Some time ago I mentioned in a post the possibility of choosing between normal albums, live albums, compilations and singles/EPs in the artist view of plex. This is possible because plex can read the RELEASETYPE tag of the audio file. The whole thing looks quite nice, but that is not all. In the plex library, album view, you can filter according to type, e.g. Compilations, Live Albums, Remixes and so forth and also according to format, e.g. album, single, EP. Plexamp, of course, can look at that as well when creating a playlist. 

Those who prefer the differentiating view are faced with the problem that albums already read by plex often have no corresponding tags. This can be done manually with an editor, e.g. mp3tag, but you have to be very careful that you enter the tags exactly as required (e.g. "album;compilation" for a compilation) plex is very picky. Then you also have to refresh the album. This takes a while, first the album disappears from the row of normal albums, then it is sorted correctly with a little delay when you refresh the view. 

However, you can also automate the process using a python script. The python script asks for the name of the album, changes or adds the 'releasetype' tag in the metadata of mp3, flac and mp4 files and finally refreshes the album in plex so that it is regrouped as a live album, compilation or single/EP. The python script is available here. 

Track genres have arrived. But now?

    

                

I would always recommend Plex as a music server in combination with the Plexamp app. 

However, there are some weaknesses. One of them is that it doesn't read the genre tags of the tracks at track level, but only at album level. This means that you cannot distinguish between the piano-accompanied ballad and the dance track on the same album.

Nor can you filter out the occasional Christmas song on an album or, conversely, elegantly add it to a Christmas playlist. 

As a workaround, however, you can use the mood tags, which can be edited at track level and are available for search functions.

If you don't want to do this track by track, the question arises as to whether you can quickly bulk tag the tracks to be tagged with a mood.

Is it christmas? How can I quickly tag many tracks with "christmas"?

You can do this by creating a playlist in the plex web app, for example with all tracks that have the word 'christmas' in the album or track name. You can then use a python script to tag all tracks in the playlist with the mood tag 'Christmas' (as a replacement for the missing genre tag). You can use this script, for example. 

In its latest version, plex recognizes track genres. However, at the moment they can't be edited in the interface. You can edit them in software like mp3tag and refresh the album though. Finally, editing is possible in plex web. Click on the stylo of the track and go to tags. If you don't have genres there, you are either on an older version of plex web or on a local version which has not been updated. 

Where are the track genres to be seen?

You can use the track genres as filters for say, a playlist which excludes some genres like Christmas or Classical Music. Go to library, tracks and you are able to list all tracks who have a particular genre or create playlists and collections using them as filters. 

However, you cannot see the filters in the album view. As a workaround, you can use python code to see and also to modify the genres. Here's some quick and dirty code which offers the missing album view.

Create your own Radio: Here's how:

   

                

Plexamp is a wonderful companion app to listen to music in your plex library. You can create artist's radios, album mixes, or track radios.

But once you've worked up an appetite, you'll want more: 

You can't create radios in plex web, the sonic proximity to the source tracks can't be determined and you can't combine two tracks or two artists. You also can't rule out the possibility of tracks heard in the last few weeks reappearing, etc. 

But wait, all this can be achieved with a python script.

An example can be found with 'Plex TraxRadio' on my github pages. The script stores in a plex playlist some tracks of the artist the source track comes from and adds sonically similar tracks of a certain distance. I also remove possible duplicates and take into account the rating of the tracks. In the published version, no tracks with a bad rating are included, but unrated tracks are. 

Have no fear...

It should be said again that I am not a professional coder, quite the opposite. Most of it was created in interaction with ChatGPT...

The possibilities with python are almost endless. For example, you could also take into account the genre(s) and much more.... 

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Ratings can be exported and saved to the files!

    

                

Ratings can be exported and saved to the files!

Even regular users of plex do not know how ratings they gave to tracks in the music library can be exported and saved in the files. In the past, I have used a workaround which meant to create a playlist with tracks of the same rating, exporting that playlist and import it to a tagger like mp3tag.

While this can be done, there is also the possibility to use a python script which fetches the ratings of the tracks be it in the whole library or just an album or a subset of the library like for example all tracks which were rated in the last week or so.  Once this is working, it is by far a faster method to backup all ratings!

Python is not so difficult as one would expect, especially if you can get mostly helpful hints from chatgpt and the like. For starters you might take a look at some scripts on github. But beware: they usually cannot be used out of the box and must be adapted to your specific use case. 

The wonderful world of filepaths and non-standardized tagging

Under "plex_for_music, you will find two scripts which may serve as a starting point. One is updating the files the ratings of which were updated in plex in the last days, weeks or months, the other takes a different approach and updates all files with plex user ratings in a given range of albums, for example all albums which have A as the first letter in their title. It might be a good idea to start with the latter one to initially update the whole library and then use the former to update from time to time. 

If you take a look at the codes you will see that the first thing you have to do is adapting it to your setting. If there is only one operating system involved, some of the transforming stuff can be deleted. Of course you may have your own folder structure and you have to adapt the script to it. Furthermore, the code to write the rating to the files is specific for the way media monkey works and if you don't use media monkey be aware that other players might take a different approach and change the code accordingly. 

Backing up album information and the joy of scripting.

In combination with plexamp, plex is a great music server and I cannot find any alternative really working as a substitute for either plex or spotify. 

Different Levels

But you have to accept that plex was not built for music and thus has a different approach than mp3 players like foobar or music organization tools like mediamonkey: It is focussed on the artist and album level. This results in the one major flaw plex has: It is not working well when it comes to compilations. (The reason is obvious: On the artist/album level, compilations do not show the artists on the different tracks and plex will (if id3 tags are properly set) recognize such albums as coming from "Various Artists". )

This difference in approach means that by far not every valuable information in your plex library is mirrored by id3tags in your files: Information such as artist info, similar artists, album reviews, sonically similar albums are on the artist or album level and therefore not reflected in the tags of individual files. 

A loss of that information certainly is tolerable if you have never added anything to what plex automatically has created. But over time, a lot of us added either a missing album review, wrote one on our own or simply changed the Release Date of the record to the date where the recording was actually made (which helps a lot to have consistent decade playlists!)

Backup with scripts is no rocket science

Although plex offers the possibility to backup your database (which is always a good idea), this does not help if you want to access the information outside of plex. And you never know, no software will be there forever, you should never completely rely on proprietary code. 

So this is where scripting comes in. If you want to maintain your metadata well, you can't do without a script or two anyway, but you should run a script for backup purposes at the latest. 

For backing up album reviews and the recording data of albums, I provide the script PlexExportAlbumNFO on github. It runs through all the albums in the library and creates an .nfo file in the folder structure of the hard disk. 

If you are not familiar with python, you can make the script work with a few simple steps. Even for beginners, this is not rocket science and may be feasible with a little research on the internet or in discussion with bing chat. 

And if you're hungry for more, I've provided a number of other scripts for maintaining metadata specifically for music libraries in plex: jackctra/plex_for_music .