Search the Community

Ok, so I've used emby from way back when it was a windows media server plugin - but I've never used it for music until now. I've decided to drop my spotify account and use emby instead. I uploaded all my music to the music directory and let emby scan it and sort out genres etc. All I can say is what a bloody mess! I have 1 "unknown" genre which contains a single album/song, "Still Crazy After all these years/%0 Ways to Leave Your Lover" - listed as David bowie! If I serch David Bowie - that album is listed as his! also have genres titled 0 through 143 there are a whole load of genre titles with often album images that bear no relevance whatsoever to the actual songs in the genre playlist - example "Dub Techno" has a title cover of The Lion King! then in the synopsis of the genre it refers to Savage Garden's debut album! The title of the playlist is "Melon Collie And The Infinite Sadness (Deluxe Edition"! It has 131 songs in the genre - including "1979" by the Smashing Pumpkins, Big Big World by Emilia, Circle of life from the Lion King by Elton John - now, I know that genres sometime have blurred definitions but there i no way that those three songs mentioned are "Dub Techno" the genre "Dub Techno" appears to have listed everything in the "All Out 90s" directory. So - what have I done wrong and how do i fix the complete mess that emby has made of reading the music directory. My music is all listed in the following directory/file structure root folder (music) L__artist | L__album | L__ track 1 L__ track 2 L__ track 3 L__ track 4 etc is that the wrong way to list it? Is there a "how to" or best practices for best results for emby and music? Where does emby get its "genre" data from? thanks

Until the latest release of Emby server, when viewing songs in my music library it used to show if a particular song was included in any of my playlists. This feature now seems to have disappeared, although it still exists for my music videos library. Was this intentional, as it was a very useful feature, and there doesn't seem to be any easy way to see if a particular song has been included in a playlist without manually searching through every playlist (not practical when you have hundreds).

I use the DLNA plugin to stream my music to another box. This works. But what doesn't work when using DLNA are the following options: - Add to playlist - Play next - Play all from here - Shuffle As soon as I select a song to end up in the playlist, it is immediately selected and played. It's the same with the other functions. If I turn off DLNA or don't use it, then I can use the above features without any problems. For me it is a bug that should be fixed. My Emby version is up to date.

Currently when I go into favorites with a long list, it is always displayed horizontally (using an iPad, and I think the same on ATV), one has to slide horizontally to view the list, while we have plenty of empty space below. I have to click on “see all” to make them fill the screen and to be able to scroll down which is more meaningful. This is especially annoying when having a lot of IP TV channels. Please make the “see all” the default view when one goes into Favorites. Another request for playlists. When I go into them and I choose one to see then decide to go back, the list jumps to the beginning instead of going back to where I left. Again, especially annoying with long IP TV playlists. It would also be nice if the empty space can be better utilized. Thanks

Hi, I am a premier subscription holder. I apologise if this isn't the correct place for this question but I didn't see a place for questions/issues with Apple Car Play. I have a playlist with over 15 hours of music. I can listen to the playlist in the car and on my mobile device up to a certain number of songs (I don't know how many but it isn't more than 50.) Any song I try to choose past that number of songs forces the player to play the first song in the playlist. One reason I really wanted to go with Emby is that I thought my wife and I would be able to get our playlist on there and shuffle them on long road trips. But if we are limited to 50 songs per list that doesn't really fit the bill. Any help you can provide would be appreciated. Thank you.

I downloaded a playlist on Android and the songs were placed in albums. How do I see the playlist when the server is turned off on my pc? If I play by shuffle it plays songs not on the playlist.

I have just set up my Emby Ubuntu server. I have set the music library directory to /data/music as my /data directory is on a RAID and I would like to change the default playlist directory to /data/playlists but I have not found a way of doing this. Can anyone advise - thanks. Robin B

Hello, We use playlists a lot for video files. In fact, it’s the primary reasons we moved over from Plex, because Emby has so many more options for dealing with playlists. However, in using it, I’ve learned that there is an oddity with the way that Emby deals with playlists. When Emby makes a playlist, if more than one version of a file exists, Emby chooses a non-specific or random version of the title that you add to the playlist. The user has no idea which version it chooses or why. It won’t always choose the highest or lowest resolution, or the mkv or HEVC. There’s no apparent rhyme or reason. So, if you have more than one file and make any changes to those files (delete the low res version for instance, leaving the other files intact or rename a hard drive - adding the new location while the first still exists to be sure everything matches up), even though those files are still there under the media title, it wrecks or even deletes the playlist automatically. I find this strange. So, I cannot specify if I want Emby to use the higher def version of a file. It just uses what it wants. However, if that file disappears, instead of just using/playing the alternate file that’s still available for that show or movie title, instead Emby deletes the playlist altogether. Also, for instance, I recently had to move the location of the files on my media drives. I had the files added to my TV Libarary from both drives simultaneously and all the files were pointed to the same titles. However, when I removed the original drive, all my playlists were deleted - even though all the titles were still there, the files were still there, and nothing has changed. I nevertheless lost all my Playlists - once again because they are based on files not titles. What’s more confusing is just now knowing what files it’s choosing to use as the basis for the playlist. This means I have even less control because I have no idea what Emby is using. Is this a bug or was it designed that way for some reason? I’ve not come across playlists behaving like this before. I like Emby better than Plex, which is why it’s our primary media server now but just as a contrast, regardless of the files and drives that one adds to Plex, the playlists don’t change because they are based on the media title, not the specific files attached to those titles. So, if the files for any given title are changed behind the scenes, it doesn’t wipe out the playlist. I’m wondering why Emby, too, isn’t making the playlists based on the titles themselves, not the files. This would allow the files relating to any given title to change while still keeping the playlist intact, if it based upon the title (letting Emby simply look to play whatever files are available for that title). I’d love to hear more about this and perhaps why Emby behaves this way. It’s puzzling, especially as we don’t have any option to choose which files it’s adding to the playlist (for instance the lower or high res, if there are more than one). Any thoughts you could share would be brilliant. Thanks so much in advance!

TL; DR: I messed up 8 playlists that has hundreds (maybe a couple thousand for 3 of them) of entries, by adding hundreds of entries instead of a few. How can I export the playlists, edit them and then re import them so they take the place of the messed up playlists? I made a mistake and screwed up playlists, most of which are not mine but my remote users'. A few of these playlists have thousands of entries, mostly TV episodes, so re-creating them is not an option and they have been modified in Emby enough that their content is unique from the originally imported Plex playlists.Yesterday I added all episodes of shows, instead of just a couple episodes, to at least 8 playlists. The web interface, the mobile interface and the Emby Theater interfaces are, I'm sorry, terrible for this. It will take me days and full carpal tunnel surgery to remove all the wrong entries using those interfaces. I'm new to Emby but I get it, these kinds of issues are low priority. I accept that but I need help working around this limitation. I think exporting the lists and then editing them, then re-imporitng them seems like the best way forward but maybe there is a better way? If not, the playlist xml files in my Emby data folder have not been updated since they were first imported from Plex and the data in the XML and the data in Emby are not even close to the same anymore. So how do I export my existing playlists? Then how do I re-import them once I've finished editing them so they take the place of the messed up playlists? Thanks, my parents are freaking out. Playlists are how they watch things through more than 2 decades of Meedio, MedaiPortal, MCE, SageTV, etc and I really screwed up their main TV one.

Hello, I recently moved over my Emby install from Linux Mint over to an OpenSUSE Tumbleweed install. A lot of it went fairly smoothly but playlists are not one of them. There are a lot of my playlists showing up, many have duplicates - about half with the correct photo half with no photo. When I click on any of them playlists, none of them show any files actually in the playlist so it can’t play anything. Moreover, when I go to TV shows or movies to add items into the empty playlists, when I click on add to playlist and it should bring up all the existing playlist options, there is absolutely nothing there. I’ve freshly added one playlist to see how that worked and now that single playlist is the only one showing up as available to add files to. When I visit the playlist library however, it shows I have 254 existing playlists (again, with no files in any of them). Any help would be brilliant. Did I miss moving some data over? Will I have to start fresh on the playlists? If so, is there any way to delete the playlists more quickly? One by one deleting and recreating will take forever with 254 to deal with. Thanks so much in advance!

Hi there, when I sync a music playlist currently to one of my mobile devices it will download all the content of the list and this is fine. Unfortunately is the playlist itself lost during the syncing process, this results in a mixing up of the new downloaded content with the still existing content on my device. E.g. I've several playlist like "Relax", "Sport" and so on. After Syncing the lists are gone and I only get the raw songs and the artist and album informations on my device. It would be nice to elect the downloaded list as list, too. So I can choose to play specific album or only some few songs which are part of a playlist. Thx.

Currently I have experienced a few rather limiting functions of the playlist system that I think could use some improving: Problems: There is no access control If a user has access to playlists they can see, edit, and create playlists system wide. Users cannot have their own private playlists A user with no access granted to playlists can still add media to any playlist in the system, even though they cannot actually browser playlists. (this is probably a bug) Attempting to click into an item in a playlist starts playback immediately rather than jump to it's info screen. Feature Requests: Playlists should only be visible to the playlist creator by default. Admins should be able to define expanded access to individual playlists. Playlist objects should have an option to "view object", if not just the default behavior. Grouping of TV show objects would be nice to ease viewing large playlists. (I mostly see users create playlists to lump a bunch of TV shows together that they can just hit shuffle on)

Is it possible to save instant mix playlists? Can anyone help with this?

Hello, I’ve noticed some weird issues with Playlists happening with Emby that I’ve not had happen before and it’s making playlist use very difficult and unpredictable. I’ve really tried to work to figure out some pattern to the issues and I’ve included that below. I’m sorry it’s a little difficult to explain and I’ve tried to be as clear as I can. I hope it’s OK. I primarily use the Roku app right now and cannot say if it affects other platforms. The first is related to a bug that I reported sometime back. When you click the play button on the Roku remote when you’re in the full list of items in one’s playlist, instead of playing the playlist from that point, it throws you out of the Emby app altogether and to the Roku Home Screen. Because you cannot click the play button within the playlist, you have to click on the playlist item (center of the d-pad on the remote), which takes you to the episode/media info page. If you click on the play button from here, the playlist does not play through as it should (continuing to play through each item on the playlist till it gets to the end). It will mostly just stop at the end of the season (despite the fact that there are all the seasons added to the playlist). And if you choose the “play repeat” option, it will only repeat from where you start playing in the season to the end and back to the one that you started with. For instance, if you start on Episode 9 of an season with 10 episodes in it, the playlist will play episode 9 then go on to episode 10 then stop. If you choose the repeat play option, it will repeat episode 9 and 10 over and over and over. Previously, the play-repeat button just allowed the playlist to play completely through everything on the playlist then start over. So, there is an odd thing right now where playlists aren’t looking at what’s on the playlist itself, but what’s in a specific season. Additionally, I’ve learned how to add items to a playlist one season at a time so that it adds everything in airdate order -at least if you have it setup to show “specials” in the season in which it played. So, one show in particular has one special at the end of every season and it’s setup in the playlist just that way so you see everything how it should be in the storyline. I noticed that on this playlist, it will do exactly what I said above - if you start on episode 10, it will play episode 10 then go onto the special. If you have the play-repeat option selected, it will replay episode 10 and the special over and over. However, this is where it gets weirder. If you start on the special in the playlist (between episode 10 and episode 1 of the next season), instead of playing on to episode 1 of the next season as it is in the playlist - it’s skipping ahead and playing the next special in the specials season. This means that Emby is somehow not looking at the playlist order at all but it’s somehow reading from the season (specials or season 00) that the special was originally in. It did this for at least 5 specials in a row - skipping over all the episodes between them in the playlist and just going from special to special. Again, this is only happening when you start on the specials. But the playlist is stopping at the end of whatever season you start in (including playing the special at the end by airdate) if you start earlier in the season. It appears that even though the items are in playlists, Emby is still reading them as though they were in seasons only and it’s not reading the order of the playlists themselves. And it’s doing that differently, depending on what episode you begin playing from. As you can imagine, it means that using playlists are virtually not usable at the moment. I should also mention that all of the above is happening in the current stable Roku app version. In addition, there’s another glitch/bug in the Playlist section of the Emby app (this time, in the beta 3.0.198 and newer) that I noticed the other day and another poster mentioned in the post thread re: the first bug mentioned. Now, when you’re in a playlist and click down to show all of your other episodes/media in the playlist, you get nothing. You cannot see any of your playlist items in the Roku app at all. The only thing you can do is to play all from the beginning - nothing more. I’m only mentioning it because it’s related to the Playlists not functioning properly and I thought it might be helpful to have the info together. I switched over the Emby because the Playlist features and options are light years ahead of Plex, where I came from. In addition, the Dev team here with Emby actually gives a care and listens to what Emby users are asking for. That makes all the difference. I know that bugs happen, which is why I’m trying to help as I run across them. I’m really hoping that these playlist glitches will be able to fixed. We use the playlists literally daily and I’m really missing being able to play through a playlist. We want to be able to start playing the playlist later in the series and then use the play-repeat function to have it start back over at the very beginning. That way, you don’t have to start with the same early episodes each time and still have it continue playing. I wish I could actually do more to help fix it, but I’ll continue to test as much as I’m able.

Hello, I’ve been able to reproduce this same behavior now at least 10 times now across two different Roku players (a Roku Ultra and a Roku Streaming Stick+) and different playlists/media. When you navigate into the Playlists section>click on a playlist>press the down button to bring up the episodes>pressing the play/pause button while any of episodes are selected>immediately throws you out of the Emby app altogether and back to the Roku home screen. I think that most people would assume that one could press the play button while an episode is selected to immediately play the list from that point (rather than having to use the d-pad to first view the episode information and then play from there). Could someone please take a look at this? Often times, I know exactly what episode I want to start on and I don’t need to view all the synopsis info and would love the ability to just click the play button and have the playlist play from there. And, at the very least, I’m hoping that it can be fixed because when I do accidentally hit that button, it gets really tiring of getting thrown all the way back out of the app and to the Roku home screen. It takes awhile to navigate back to where I was. Please let me know if you need more info. I did attempt to update all the Roku software on both units today so it’s running the latest version of the standard Roku app (not the beta). Thanks so much!

Hello! I started looking at Emby because the Plex playlists features are woefully inadequate and despite paying premium users begging for basic additional controls for literally years now, they are completely ignoring us. I reached out via a couple of forums to other Emby users to find out if what I’m looking for is doable in Emby - namely, a simple repeat feature to be able to start watching something later in a playlist and it have continue playing by circling back to the beginning until it’s stopped. My spouse and I both have severe sleep problems and we like to sleep to various TV playlists in the background but it gets tiring to have to start early on and end up watching the same few shows over and over because the media won’t keep playing once it gets to the end. I had folks respond and tell me that Emby does indeed have the ability to repeat video playlists with a simple button click somewhere to choose it. Brilliant! I was thrilled and decided to jump in with both feet. So, I’ve spend the last few days (straight) getting Emby installed, and up and running and manually fixing all the videos that it didn’t properly pull the metadata and images for. I finally made several playlists last night to take a look at the actually functions and navigation and so far, much of it is miles ahead of Plex, thankfully! However, I cannot find where I change the settings to allow a playlist to repeat itself and continue playing once it gets to the end. I’ve looked everywhere I can think of and still cannot seem to find it. Right now, I’m doing all the editing and setup in a browser but the playback is actually via the Roku client, at this point. Can anyone please, please help me figure out how to setup video playlists to repeat all? I know the setting has to be in there somewhere but it’s just so frustrating that I cannot seem to find it yet. I know folks wouldn’t have told me that it was not only possible but simple/easy to do via a quick setting change, if it wasn’t true. They definitely seemed to know what they were talking about. I’m just frustrated at my own lack of knowledge in being able to find the settings myself or via a search! Thanks so much in advance for any info and assistance! I look forward to learning Emby better from this amazing community!

Greetings! I have been living with a "ghost" playlist issue for some time now (placed a m3u file in a lib folder, then deleted it, then added it back, and since the playlist contents have been "frozen"), so today decided to give a manual fix a try inspecting/manipulating the db directly. I think the root cause is that the record in the db does not have a path to the corresponding m3u file anymore Because of this I decided (after a db backup) to attempt both UPDATE and DELETE of the record, but in both cases I get back the error in the title... My experience with sqlite is non-existent, so I tried doing this from multiple clients (extenal dBeaver adapter, TNAS's pre-installed 'sqlite3' binary, and again using the TNAS's python + sqlite adapter), but the error is consistent. Does anybody have any suggestion / had similar issues? Thanks in advance ---- Device: F2-220 TOS version: 4.0.13 Emby Server version: 4.1.0.1

I have just been getting into using Emby for streaming my music. I have noticed a few things that would be really nice (in my opinion). Allow download playlists (instead of albums only) <-I know this one has been posted before Warning for adding a song to a playlist which already contains that song add album title in playlist view add link to album and artist from within playlist view (same as it is in the suggestions page) in playlist allow move multiple (up or down for ordering) allow remove multiple from playlist Play music from downloads if a download exists for that song (especially when I only downloaded the songs from within the playlist and don't have all the songs from that album downloaded). I noticed when driving home from work that when I hit a dead zone my music pauses until my service returns, even when playing downloaded music. Thanks to all the devs for all the work you put into Emby. It is an awesome piece of software.

I have already mentioned this in a previous topic but I figured I would put out a formal request. Basically, in cinema mode, I would like custom intros to be played before every episode on a playlist. I would use this for commercials and would create a PseudoTV like experience. I would guess its already configured to ONLY play one intro per playlist on purpose, so I would like a toggle to make it play intros every episode. I have another playlist idea I will be posting later with mockups that I think would help a lot of people, but this request is obviously much more specific to what I wanna do with Emby lol. Thanks!

Two of my users have created playlists, and when they select "Add to playlist" the dropdown menu shows every playlists that either of them has. Selecting another user's playlist adds the item to it. When they go to watch their playlists, they only see their own. Users who have not created playlists only see "New..." but once they create one, they can select other users' playlists too. The UserId in the playlist.xml only shows one user each. I tested two playlists with the same name: both show up, and have separate items, so users can easily get them mixed up.

At one time I have had windows media player playlists show up in Media browser 3 classic. I'm not sure if I had updated to the most recent version of Emby that the playlists disappeared, but the playlists had disappeared and I cannot get them to show up again anywhere. Can someone explain to me what has happened, and, or, how to get them back? I am using the latest version of Emby classic on a windows 7 32bit HTPC. Any help would be appreciated Anthony

It's my opinion that playlists (particularly for music) are items that are best navigated with text descriptions rather than images, and there is currently no option for list view in emby theater. The default presentation for playlists in emby theater is a mosaic image of four album covers from items within the playlist. Since most playlists are more than 4 tracks, this does not help discriminate between the items on the screen. What's worse, the text below the image is comparatively small and will be truncated to a fixed size. I understand that Google Play Music uses this type of mosaic image navigation for their web interface. However, I suggest that for playlists on a 10-foot UI, it would be much more efficient to use the "list view" that is available in the emby web interface. If not the default, it should at least be an option.

So I'm pretty sure that if you have your Library set to "Group movies into collections," and individual movies from a Collection are added as the first items on a Playlist, you will not be able to play that Playlist normally. To get the playlist to play, you'll have to select and play the first title itself. I'm probably an edge case, but there's no way I can get by without grouping movies into Collections in my library view. Any thoughts?

I hope this is the right forum for this issue. I'm having trouble getting Emby to see things correctly. For instance, it sees the White album, it sees the first cd of 25 Blues Masters, but it doesn't see the rest of the Blues Masters cds, and makes just silly additions to the playlist tree. The ripping program recognized the series of CDs during the rip, and suggested appropriate (used) folder names. My HDD: \Music \Blues Masters \cd1 \cd2 \cd3 \cd4 Emby: Music 25 Blues Masters 25 Blues Masters Vol. 1 J. Reed (from a totally seperate folder!) Beathovan (from a totally different - everything!) I used a professional CD ripper to do this. I successfully ripped the White Album this way and it works perfectly. Emby lists 30 songs in one directory with the folder structure: \Beatles \Disk 1 \Disk 2 Can anyone explain what's going wrong? Since it all works on tags, and the tags were all present in the ripping, where's the error? Thanks.

Hey! I am new to the Emby family but I am loving what I am seeing so far! Anyway, I was messing around with Cinema mode and saw that it had custom intro functionality which I thought was really cool. However, it will only play that intro in front of the first episode on a playlist, when actually I want it before EVERY episode on the playlist. You may be asking, why I'd want that, and the main reason is I am using the custom intro functionality to insert classic commercial blocks in front of my content. If I were able to do this with playlists, I could make PsuedoTV Live style of playlists that have commercial blocks in between the episodes. This would mainly be for use with the Web app and would be on a profile separate from my other one, as I would not want commercials in front of all my on demand content. Thanks!