Setting up Plex again
I set up my Plex server again this week. I use it primarily to access video inside my own apartment... but this time I set it up with my music too, which has been an interesting experience.
Making a playlist on Plex remains a frustrating experience. Plex has both playlists and collections, which work very differently when you have multiple users accessing your server... but occupy confusingly similar spaces when you are really the only person accessing your stuff.
It gets weirder for music... Plex, as far as I know, cannot import common playlist file formats like M3U. You have to use a weird third party website to do this (I found a very suspicious one which claimed to use AI and wanted my google account authentication... no thank you) or interact with the API directly, which is pretty silly.
I know that it is difficult to build and maintain live service products, but it seems like this functionality has been possible within Plex for years, just not on the app GUI. Someone put a tool to do this for you on GitHub, but it requires you to run powershell scripts. As an idiot loser who stumbled through Python with great suffering and effort a few weeks ago to run Beets, the amount of effort needed to change my computer's script-running policy so I can run this script on my system, and then probably have to spend time changing my playlist file types to M3U from M3U8, and THEN go through all the effort of importing and managing the playlists generally... all of that is kind of not worth it when I already have a solution that works for my house. And that is: putting bluetooth headphones on my head and walking around, like I always do. My apartment has two rooms. I am never out of range.
Seems pretty crazy that Plex, a tool which surfaces so much fiddly information and choices to the user, would not finally make its existing functionality public! I'm sure there's some impossibly strange thing here getting in the way of shipping this feature, but I don't know it, so I just get to be the whiny customer and complain about it.
The benefit of doing all this playlist management work would be pretty narrow: gaining the ability to play certain existing, long-ass playlists on my television, using my TV's speakers. It isn't so hard for me to make "smart playlists" from my music using Plex's existing tools, but I do still really want those extremely large dumb handmade playlists I have been cultivating for years. They are stupid, but they are mine. And I am not willing to rebuild or update them by hand across multiple tools and services.
So instead, I will just continue to walk around my (very small) apartment while wearing the overly large bluetooth gamer headphones I use for work. It's no so bad!! It's how I'm livin' now!!