location of music playlists in backup?

[Jägs 72]

My apologies if this has been asked/answered, but a quick search did not yield an obvious thread that covered this question.  What I am wondering is where Emby stores music playlists from the server configuration backup plugin?

The reason I ask is that I've just started using Emby for music—I'm a long-time Subsonic user—and am paranoid about backing up my playlists, because Subsonic's DB had a tendency of barfing periodically.  The first time I got burned by this prompted me to write a cron script to automatically export the playlists as M3U and add them to my backup processes.

I was wanting to do the same—or something similar—with Emby, and realized there already is a server configuration backup plugin that I've been using since I've become a lifetime Premiere member.  The problem, though, is I cannot see in the file structure where the XML file is for the music playlists.  I see the one video playlist I've made in "<backup path>/Emby Backup - <date/time> - Auto/playlists" but I cannot seem to find the music ones.

So, a few questions:

1. Are music playlists backed up as part of the plugin?
2. If so, where might I find the music playlists backups?
3. If not, why are these not backed up?  Also, is there a way to export the playlists—be it through existing functionality, API, etc.?

Thanks!

[Carlo 4330]

Hi, A quick question for you.  When you create the playlists for music are you seeing these show up in the PLAYLISTS library?

[Jägs 72]

I believe so?  When I click on "Playlists" in Emby, they show up right along side my video playlist.  I've attached a screenshot that shows this—all of the items in the screenshot are music playlists, save for "DS9 Condensed," which is a video playlist.

[ebr 14910]

Hi.  The configuration backup plugin is designed to help you backup your server configuration.  It doesn't back up any of your media or metadata (which would include playlists).  

[Carlo 4330]

52 minutes ago, Jägs said:

I believe so?  When I click on "Playlists" in Emby, they show up right along side my video playlist.  I've attached a screenshot that shows this—all of the items in the screenshot are music playlists, save for "DS9 Condensed," which is a video playlist.

Good, so they are available to backup manually.

On my system the playlists are located here:
C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Roaming\Emby-Server\programdata\data\playlists

That is on Windows and the bold part will be the username you login with.
This could be a slightly different area on your system but you should be able to find them.

Take a look at your DASHBOARD at the bottom and you'll see paths listed.  That should help you find the playlist location.

Let us know how you make out.

[ebr 14910]

52 minutes ago, cayars said:

Good, so they are available to backup manually.

On my system the playlists are located here:
C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Roaming\Emby-Server\programdata\data\playlists

That is on Windows and the bold part will be the username you login with.
This could be a slightly different area on your system but you should be able to find them.

Take a look at your DASHBOARD at the bottom and you'll see paths listed.  That should help you find the playlist location.

Let us know how you make out.

Just something to be aware of here - if you are always restoring back into the same system then this will probably be fine but things like playlists are dependent on things like exact path references so may or may not be portable across different installations.

[Carlo 4330]

Yes absolutely.

If what ebr mentioned comes to pass this KB article can be of help with manual migrations
https://support.emby.media/support/solutions/articles/44001849016-playlist-manual-migration

Same thing for collections (for now) but this will change soon for those running beta with the next release after 4.6.0.10
https://support.emby.media/support/solutions/articles/44001173192-collections-manual-migration

 

[Jägs 72]

user@host:/volume1/home/emby/data/playlists $ ls -la
total 16
drwxr-xr-x    4 emby     emby          4096 Nov 28 11:14 ./
drwxr-xr-x    6 emby     emby          4096 Jan  8 20:20 ../
drwxr-xr-x    2 emby     emby          4096 Nov 28 11:14 DS9 Condensed [playlist]/
drwxr-xr-x    2 emby     emby          4096 Jun 11  2020 Tempus Fugit [playlist]/

So, this is all I see in the playlists path.  One is a the video playlist I referenced above.  The other is one (video) I created and deleted a while ago, so I'm not sure why it's here.

NOTE:  I am running a beta of 4.6—to take advantage of the newly added "composer" tag—so perhaps that has something to do with it?

Any other suggestions as to where to look for this?

Quote

Just something to be aware of here - if you are always restoring back into the same system then this will probably be fine but things like playlists are dependent on things like exact path references so may or may not be portable across different installations.

Duly noted.  I've already run across this when migrating from my home-built server to a NAS, so I have a handy command-line PERL script to take care of any path changes, but as you noted, this is primarily a contingency that should something happen to Emby, I can quickly recover/rebuild my playlists, which have taken a lot of time to build/curate.

Thanks for your help!

[Happy2Play 8281]

Another question is are these playlists that you created in Emby?

Other playlists that Emby imports are not save in playlist folder.

 

[Carlo 4330]

If you have the correct paths in the m3u file in your music files Emby will import them and show them in you playlists.
But as Happy2Play pointed out won't be there to backup because they are part of your music library!

Glad you mentioned that Happy2play.

[Jägs 72]

1 hour ago, Happy2Play said:

Another question is are these playlists that you created in Emby?

Other playlists that Emby imports are not save in playlist folder.

 

Yeah, that's the issue:  I've "imported" them by adding my old Subsonic backup folder to one of the music libraries in Emby.  Is there a "proper" way of importing them so that I can continue to edit them and back up any changes?

[Carlo 4330]

Happy2Play might know a way but I don't to back them up short of backing up only m3U files from your music directories.

You're kind of outside the box here on this and there isn't an easy way to backup this type of thing since it's not an Emby Playlist per say but imported.

If you're only issue (correct me if I'm wrong) is you want to backup the music playlists why not just back them up from your music library directly?

[Happy2Play 8281]

Assuming all of these playlists are in your media folder, you would have to backup said media folder as all of these m3u files only relevant to their current location depending on how the files are actually written.

Example if full path or relative path is written

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:331,2Pac & George Clinton - Can't C Me
C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\2Pac\All Eyez on Me\CD 2\2-01 2Pac & George Clinton - Can't C Me.mp3
#EXTINF:232,2Pac - Shorty Wanna Be a Thug
C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\2Pac\All Eyez on Me\CD 2\2-02 2Pac - Shorty Wanna Be a Thug.mp3
#EXTINF:296,2Pac - Holla at Me
C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\2Pac\All Eyez on Me\CD 2\2-03 2Pac - Holla at Me.mp3

 

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:331,2Pac & George Clinton - Can't C Me
2-01 2Pac & George Clinton - Can't C Me.mp3
#EXTINF:232,2Pac - Shorty Wanna Be a Thug
2-02 2Pac - Shorty Wanna Be a Thug.mp3
#EXTINF:296,2Pac - Holla at Me
2-03 2Pac - Holla at Me.mp3

I used mp3tag to generate these playlists.

[Carlo 4330]

So can you give us more info?

What are you trying to accomplish with the backup of playlists?
ie. keep users from changing them?

What OS do you run Emby server on?

[Jägs 72]

Sorry of I was not clear earlier, but here's what I'm trying to do:

• I am currently using Subsonic and want to migrate off of it to Emby.
• I have exported my playlists from Subsonic as M3U files that have the correct paths to the audio files (i.e., they match the library paths in Emby and work fine inside of Emby when added to a library)
• I want to import them "properly" into Emby as playlists that I can then maintain them in Emby itself (add, remove, reorder, etc.) without having to manually create them.
• Once inside of Emby—again, I'm planning on changing them once they are in Emby—I'd like a process to back up the playlists, in case Emby should go tango uniform.  M3U would be great, but pretty much anything I can manipulate into an M3U—xml, txt, etc.—is fine.

Any suggestions on how to achieve this would be greatly appreciated.

Oh, and I'm running Emby Server 4.6.0.10 beta on an ASUSTOR.

[Luke 37060]

Quote

• I want to import them "properly" into Emby as playlists that I can then maintain them in Emby itself (add, remove, reorder, etc.) without having to manually create them.

Hi, you don't need to do that. Your m3u's are just fine. In fact it's on my to do list to stop saving playlist items to xml and just use m3u as it's a more standardized format.

[Jägs 72]

22 hours ago, Luke said:

Hi, you don't need to do that. Your m3u's are just fine. In fact it's on my to do list to stop saving playlist items to xml and just use m3u as it's a more standardized format.

Yeah, my problem was a permission issue.  Once I changed the ownership to "emby" for the playlists, modifying them within Emby changed the M3Us themselves, so I should be good to go with just backing up the playlist folder.  Thanks for all of your help!

[Luke 37060]

Thanks for the feedback !

[TomTiddler 39]

On 1/21/2021 at 2:11 AM, Luke said:

Hi, you don't need to do that. Your m3u's are just fine. In fact it's on my to do list to stop saving playlist items to xml and just use m3u as it's a more standardized format.

Whooooaaaa!! Did I understand that correctly? You're going to start saving Emby playlists as M3U's? Any idea when this would be available? I use Emby to organize my audio stuff, but I use a different app to actually play the music. It only allows M3U for playlists and has absolutely awful tools for creating playlists, whereas Emby is really good for that. It would save me enormous grief if I could Create and edit in Emby, and point the other app at the playlists that resulted.

[Luke 37060]

I'm not sure when I'll be able to get to it, it's just something I'd like to do.

[TomTiddler 39]

Well, I for one would welcome this, anytime you feel like it

 

[txoilguy 1]

sorry, not supper computer savvy but what i understand is to back up playlists i literally copy the folder in the tree for a backup? i ask because i have had issues with the lists disappearing for an array of reasons, some my fault. it would be awesome it have a backup to restore. my understanding is that the back up plugin does not keep that info.

[Luke 37060]

@cayars

[Carlo 4330]

23 hours ago, txoilguy said:

sorry, not supper computer savvy but what i understand is to back up playlists i literally copy the folder in the tree for a backup? i ask because i have had issues with the lists disappearing for an array of reasons, some my fault. it would be awesome it have a backup to restore. my understanding is that the back up plugin does not keep that info.

The backup plugin does back this up for you.  You can also back this info up manually as well.

You can read about both is this KB article:
https://support.emby.media/support/solutions/articles/44001159936-configuration-backup

One thing to keep in mind is that playlists have the location of media hard coded in the file so if you move any of this media around on disc it would cause a problem.  How to handle this is covered in this article:
https://support.emby.media/support/solutions/articles/44001849016-playlist-manual-migration

I hope that helps,
Carlo

[Luke 37060]

@txoilguy has this helped you?