PLEX playlists are missing some sorting features — perhaps for good reason — that can be solved by creative abuse of song moods.

The Issue

Some of the issue is downright linguistic | intentional.

What is a playlist? For some people {0-100%}, a playlist is a curated, in-order list of songs they want to play. For some people {0-100%}, a playlist is a subsection of their musical library to help sort from years of backlog. For some people {0-100%}, a playlist is simply a large glob of music to played on random shuffle for long periods of time.

These groups can overlap where sometimes someone wants a big hunking random glob of music and sometimes wants to drill down to a specific artist in that glob and focus on that.

PLEX, though, seems to almost exclusively lean to the first definition for their playlists with the third being included by the shuffle command.

Which leads to an issue for the second definition.

Let’s say you build up a list of some of your current favorite songs [see image above for a few random picks]. Then, you think “Oh wait, I forgot this song by a particular artist” and you add another one…

Now that new song is there at the bottom. As you mouse over it [evidenced back in the top screenshot] you can click and drag it or delete it, but once a playlist gets over, say, 50+ songs the amount of time you can spend adding new tracks by an artist and sorting can get lengthy.

On MOBILE, it does allow you to “see” a playlist by albums and artists, but it puts those items in the order they first show-up rather than alphabetically and clicking on that item doesn’t take you to the songs in the playlist that match the criteria but to the whole album or artist:

This means that a playlist as it stands serves only the first and third categories: Specific Play Order and Random Glob. However, I really prefer the second and third categories mostly: Musical Subset and Random Glob.

I set out to see if I could figure out a workaround, and I sort of did.

Collections and Smart Playlists

Playlists are not the only other sorting method in PLEX. There are actually several (including stuff like Folders) but for now I’ll look at two: Collections and Smart Playlists.

Collections are applied on the Artist and Album level (but not song). They can be whatever you need. I keep several albums sorted in various collections for soundtracks to various solo play campaigns and a broad pair called “Spark Joy” — for something akin to “current hits” — and “Core” — more for major albums of my life.

Smart Playlists are as they seem: playlists generated “on the fly” based on certain criteria which match. Album genre, release date, artist country of origin, whatever.

For reasons I do not understand, Smart Playlists support better sorting.

For instance, I can create a Smart Playlist that only shows music released in 2026 and then sorts it by most played albums so my top played stuff is near the top. It’s a fairly trivial sort.

The problem with this is that Smart Playlists are looking for certain standard criteria. That DEMO playlist above is lacking any obvious structure that would make a good Smart Playlist. There’s several j-pop pieces and then a single song from Belgium.

How do we bridge that gap? This is where I realized I could “abuse” Moods to create something new.

Song Moods

Songs do not have “Collections” as part of their tags for whatever reason. They only have “Moods” and “Genres.” This is, perhaps, an oversight. However, this is all about hacking around limitations.

Let’s go back to the idea of a “Spark Joy” list for current hits. I can add a “Mood” to a song I want to be in my Spark Joy list. I can call it what I want, but for now I’ll just call it Spark Joy (which I’ll apply to the recent “drop dead” by Olivia Rodrigo):

I can go through and add this Mood to every song I want to be on the playlist. Then generate a Smart Playlist based on the Spark Joy Mood, and get something like this:

A playlist that allows for types 2 and 3, which is good for me.

It also allows me to build “anti-moods” [I use zzzKEYWORD to make it easy to find] to exclude songs from being played from Smart Playlists generated from wider criteria (e.g., country of origin). Why? Think of things where you have a genre or decade or whatever but in the middle of that is a “Best Of” or “Live” album that you don’t want to have play. You can set up something complicated like this:

Essentially, if it matches any of those genres but does NOT have the track mood “zzzJapanese” then it will show up. It can also be useful I want to tag a bunch of albums has having something like “Epic” mood but there are a few songs that break immersion, that sort of thing.

Type 1 Playlists Require Actual PLEX Playlists

With that being said, if you want the type 1 playlist — Specific Play Order — this will not work. For those, you would use the actual PLEX playlists.

Far From Perfect

All this being said, this is far from perfect and it is not a slam-dunk solution. I like it, because it allows me to do metadata sorting. It fits my mindset as a librarian. Still, there are issues. Some might be killers for you.

(1) [SMART ]PLAYLISTS DO NOT HAVE QUICK SONG EDITS

If you are in the album view, etc, you have a little pencil icon you can click on to edit a song where you can adjust song mood and such. For some reason, this is hidden in the playlist view, including Smart Playlists. This means if you get to a song you no longer want to be in the playlist, you have to click on the song title, go to the album, and then click on the pencil icon there.

(2) NO SUPPORT ON MOBILE (?) YET (?)

I thought I read in release notes that PLEX was going to {soon | in beta | ???} support editing track/item metadata on mobile but right now it does not seem to exist, at least not on my build and app. This means if you use this system to build up sortable playlists, you have to use the Web interface while you can use the more traditional playlists just fine in mobile.

(3) UNSURE: MIGHT NOT WORK ON SHARED

This one I don’t know, but it possibly won’t allow folks whom you share your library with to build their own similar set-ups. I’ll have to test this one and get back to you (Kaz has been wanting access, so they can be the guinea pig).

(4) TIME CONSUMING

The biggest problem is that it takes a fair amount of time to start. After you get early parts in place, adding a few songs is relatively trivial but the initial building of the Mood, Anti-Mood, and Smart Playlist is potentially a longish investment.

Compared to the time it would it to take you to do something similar in Foobar2000 it is pretty extensive. I assume Spotify can do it pretty quickly.

STILL, something like PLEX gives you control over your own music in many ways, while retaining the ability to play it across multiple devices or on the go.