PlexPlaylistExport

A small python script to export music playlists created on a Plex media server to the M3U format for use in external software (VLC, etc.) or hardware (MP3 players, Flash drives, Car infotainment systems, etc.) players. The script only generates the M3U and does not actually export the media itself. The export of the media itself is done using beets.

If this means nothing to you, you can probably stop reading right now. Otherwise, go ahead, you might have a similar use-case as me.

Prerequisites

High-Level

This script was originally created to work in tandem with the following software:

• beets: the music geek’s media organizer: This is the go-to music organizer and I can recommend it to anyone who wants to bring order into the chaos that is probably most peoples music library. Specifically useful in my workflow is the export feature provided by beets 'move' command in combination with the playlist plugin.
• Plex Media Server: As introduced above, Plex is my go-to media frontend I use on Smart TVs, Phones, Tablets, PCs, Laptops, you name it. Well everything except for my car. So I create all my playlists using Plex.

If you use beets to organize your music and this directly feeds into your Plex media server, you're good to go and this script might actually help you.

If on the other hand you feel lost right now then this script is probably not for you. This was your second warning ;)

Low-Level

1. Python 3
2. The plexapi library (use pip install plexapi to install)
3. The unidecode library (use pip install unidecode to install)

My workflow

If you like to know a bit more about my use-case, read on, otherwise you can skip this section.

Since years I have been an avid user of Plex. I love having all my media in one place available on many different devices. However, I have a car with an infotainment system that is quite outdated by today's standards. It lacks Android Auto/Apple CarPlay, has minimal app support and thus in order to support Plex in my car I would have to resort to Bluetooth, which frankly for anyone who gives a damn about audio quality is just s**t. The car however supports your typical audio files from MP3 to AAC, read either from an internal disk or via USB flashdrive. And since I have the premium sound system for the car I want to have the best possible audio output. Thus in my case: export the raw audio files, combine them with playlists and I get the most comparable Plex experience on the road with minimal (if any) loss in fidelity.

How does it work?

So we have established you need

• A music library that is organized using beets and you have the playlist plugin configured and ready to use.
• Your Plex music library is created based on the folder structure provided by beets and you have playlist(s) set up for this library.

If this holds true for you then you might be able to use this script with your Plex server. So what else do you need to get started:

1. Your Plex server base URL (in your local network, i.e., http://192.168.0.10:32400), which you provide to script via the --host <url> argument
2. A token to access your Plex server with, which you provide using --token <thetoken> argument. You can find out how to get such a token here

Querying the available playlists

Using the above mentioned arguments --host and --token we are now ready to start communicating with the Plex server. You may want to start by querying all available playlists that can be used for export. We're limiting everything to music playlists.

To query your playlists run the script with:

python3 PlexPlaylistExport.py --host <baseurl> --token <yourtoken> --list

This will output all available playlists for export.

Exporting to M3U

To export a specific playlist you need to supply it's name to the script.

python3 PlexPlaylistExport.py --host <baseurl> --token <yourtoken> --playlist <yourplaylist> --plex-music-root-dir '/music' --replace-with-dir '..'

So you might wonder what is --plex-music-root-dir and --replace-with-dir. The first one is the root path to the music library in your Plex environment. Let's assume you have your music in Plex setup such that everything is mounted under the /music directory. Below this you might have /music/beets/<artist>/<album>/.... So a typical path to a file in your Plex environment might look like /music/beets/<artist>/<album>/<title>.ext.

In order to work with the M3U playlists we intend to create you might have to adjust that path so that it works for the M3U as well. The second argument allows you to specify a replacement for the Plex music root described above. So you can supply for instance --replace-with-dir '..' and the paths created in the M3U will be of the ../beets/<artist>/<album>/<title>.ext format. As you can see we simply replace /music with .. so you have relative paths in the created playlists.

Executing this command will create a file named <yourplaylist>.m3u in the working directory where you executed the command. Now the M3U playlist might not be useful in this location and it is up to you to place it somewhere where the paths specified in it get a meaning.

Optional arguments

The following optional arguments can be supplied when combined with the --playlist argument:

• --write-album: Outputs album information in #EXTALB lines in the M3U.
• --write-album-artist: Outputs album artist information in #EXTART lines in the M3U.
• --asciify: You might have to deal with a device that is not capable of displaying Unicode characters or just simply ignores lines that contain Unicode characters alltogether (such as my car's infotainment system). In this case you might want to try this option which removes all Unicode characters in #EXTINF, #EXTALB and #EXTART lines. It does however not ASCII-fy your paths. If you need to do this I suggest you use beets asciify_paths option.

Addendum: Exporting your music with beets

This is not really part of my script and thus I don't really see this as a must for this documentation but for completeness sake I will finish up with what I'm doing now after I exported my playlist to M3U.

To export one such M3U playlist, you have to have the playlist plugin setup correctly in beets. Copy the playlist you exported with this script to the playlist directory you specified in the beets config. Then change your working directory to this path and run for instance beet ls playlist:<yourplaylist>.m3u. If everything is setup correctly, beets should output all the media contained in this playlist. If not, make sure all your paths are set up correctly.

Good, now that the above command works, I usually export the entire playlist (or multiple playlists) so that I can move them to a USB thumbdrive. This is done by using

beet move -e -d /path/to/export/to playlist:<yourplaylist>.m3u

Notice the -e option which does an export instead of an actual move of your media. So in this case it will output all the media contained in <yourplaylist>.m3u to the path specified in -d /path/to/export/to. From there it is again up to you to place this data in such a way that it makes sense with the playlist you created.

For me this is usually the following structure:

/export
  - /beets
  - /playlists

where in /beets I have the structure as exported by the beet move -e command from above and in /playlists I have all my playlists created with this script. With the default setup of the ..-relative-paths this should work really well and it does for me and my car.