Exporting/Adding iTunes Smart Playlists To Plex

[Mr.V600]

This is how you can export Smart Playlists from iTunes into Plex using an intermediate program called Postman.

This guide based on Windows operating system. You could replace the iTunes part with creating your own m3u files (through scripting or other music programs) and then submitting them to Plex in the same way.

The general idea is as follows:

1. Create a Music library in Plex that is same files that iTunes sees
2. Create a playlist on iTunes. In this case I will be using Smart Playlist that looks at the comment field of each track
3. Export the Playlist as an m3u file
4. Make sure the file paths in the m3u are the same as Plex will see
5. Get some system settings from Plex to put into Postman
6. Send the playlist m3u file to Plex through http request
7. Close Plex (click in system tray and select Exit on Plex icon, or close task in Windows Task Manager)
8. Restart Plex (should be an icon in your Start menu)
9. Playlist should now show up in your music library
10. Plex does not seem to automatically pick up changes, and iTunes does not export playlist automatically
11. Will need to periodically resave m3u file for newer tracks added and re-post through Postman to Plex
12. Restart Plex after each session of updating playlists
13. The X-Plex-Token does not seem to change very often (hasn't change for me yet)
14. Can submit multiple playlists to the same Plex music library
15. Can save the config settings for each playlist in Postman so it's easy to open and submit quickly

Create a Smart Playlist, using the comment field of tracks

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Edit the comment field of the track to have the keywords

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Can edit the comment field in iTunes

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Or in other media programs, like Foobar2000

Export the playlist in iTunes through File > Library > Export Playlist...

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Be sure to change the file type to m3u. In my experience m3u will properly show UTF-8 kanji characters, so I do not use the m3u8 file type.

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Here is what the exported file looks like

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I use a Notepad++ macro to remove all the comment lines (# at the beginning of the line)
Cleaned up version of file

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Here is what Postman looks like. Create these 3 keys & values.

1. sectionID
2. path
3. X-Plex-Token

To get the sectionID and X-Plex-Token, click on Get Info of any song in your music library

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Click on View XML

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From the URL of the browser page get the IP Address and Port of Plex as well as the X-Plex-Token from

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Within the XML get the sectionID

Once you filled everything out, hit Send
If you just get a blank line at the bottom as the response, then everything is ok

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If you get an error, then that means something you typed in is wrong

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Restart Plex server and you should now see Playlists section

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