playlist creation tools

[Peter Weyandt]

Is there any way to manually update a playlist in JellyFin?  I have some large music playlists I want to add.  They current methods I have seen are pretty much one off. 
I tried creating a playlist and found there is an xml file that is created.  I tried manually editing the playlist but it did not work and when I added another song the ones I manually added were over written.
I am thinking that the playlists are actually stored in a Db not in the xml files and the xml files are perhaps back up. 

Are there any instructions for manually editing the playlists?
Thanks for the help.

[TheDreadPirate]

I think it is both the DB and the XML. How do you want to edit the playlist? Add songs? Remove songs? Move them around? You can do all of those things, as long as you are the owner of the playlist.

[Peter Weyandt]

I am mostly just adding songs already in my library.  I have a lot of playlists that I have ported around for a few years. It would be a lot of work to add songs one at a time.  I saw that I can add albums and even genres or artists. 
I was planning on writing a script to iterate over the old list to extract the data I needed, I think just the link to the song based on what I saw, and then manipulate the text in the xml file. 
I think I did the same thing to import the playlists into Plex.  I think there may have been an API available with Plex to edit the DB.
It does look like the playlist is in the db.  If there is not an API I would need to figure out how I would work on the DB in my case.  I have Jellyfin running in a Podman container on Fedora.

[Peter Weyandt]

I just found this.... https://api.jellyfin.org/#tag/Playlists
It looks like this is the way to go. I am going to play around a bit and see if I can update a playlist via the API.
I will update this post with my results as soon as I get some time to play around with it.
Thanks for your help "TheDreadPirate"

[TheDreadPirate]

Jellyfin does not allow editing of, I'm assuming, M3U playlists that are in your music library folder.

BUT, if you do have existing M3U playlists you should be able to add that existing playlist to a new playlist that is Jellyfin created and managed.

[Peter Weyandt]

are there instructions on how to do this? I am trying to work through the API but having a difficult time with the documentation.

[TheDreadPirate]

Click on the "..." context menu for the playlist and "Add to playlist", select "new", name the playlist, done.

[Peter Weyandt]

I figured out I can add a playlist to the root of the Music folder.
I can see the m3u playlist but it is blank.
is there some special format that Jellyfin is looking for?
I have changed the permissions of the file to 777.

Here is a sample of a test file:

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:,Young Americans
David Bowie/ChangesOneBowie/9. Young Americans.mp3
#EXTINF:,Golden Years
/David Bowie/ChangesOneBowie/11. Golden Years.mp3
#EXTINF:,“Heroes”
David Bowie/“Heroes”/3. “Heroes”.mp3

I have played around with the address to the file.
I used what it looks like JellyFin would see.
I used the full URL from the directory.
Nothing I have tried has made the files show up in the playlist.
I must have something off. Do you have a sample of one that worked for you?
thanks.

[TheDreadPirate]

M3Us can literally be a list of file paths. Nothing special, you don't even need those headers in yours.

- The M3U must be in a library path
- Jellyfin needs permission to read it
- The songs that the playlist references must themselves be in a music library that Jellyfin can read
- The paths you provide in the M3U must be absolute paths or relative paths from the M3U's location to the referenced song

It is really that simple.

[Peter Weyandt]

I just did a test. It worked. All I have are the files listed with their directories from the point where the playlist is located.
the exact contents are:

David Bowie/ChangesOneBowie/9. Young Americans.mp3
David Bowie/ChangesOneBowie/11. Golden Years.mp3

All I can think of is the hearders and such are causing it to fail.
Thanks again for you help.
I really appreciate it.
This took me a lot longer than I thought it would but it saves me the time of recreating all the playlists of my music.