My iTunes preferences/media folder location keeps going to default

I can't thank you enough. If I click "Helpful" does it close our conversation? If I click "This solved my question" will it also close the conversation? The reason I haven't is that I'm not 100% I won't have any few follow-up questions related to this.

I hope you know by my repeated kudo's and thank you, THANK YOU! shout-outs, that I'm massively appreciative.

Truly, you have been simply irreplaceable and I can't thank you enough!

CHEERS!

ALL MY PLAYLISTS HAVE SUCCESSFULLY IMPORTED INTO PLEX!!!!!

I thought at first it wasn't going to work because I got the message you did that said "something went wrong, make sure the server is available and try again." But I waited a second (I was capturing the screen) and then I noticed the playlist (sort of like album covers) started moving around. I did cancel the popup message and then just watched as it gloriously updated one-by-one. I had cleaned a bunch of playlists out yesterday and today. Not sure if that was the issue. It imported the new playlists I created as well.

One step I took in addition before doing the import was to "log out" of Plex, and then stop Plex on the NAS. Then I copied the new, updated XML onto the Music1 folder. Started Plex on the NAS and then logged into Plex. I did the scan file library as you instructed. It took longer this time than yesterday. Then did the import playlists.

I'm not sure what happened to make it successful today and not yesterday. I also got the "error" message yesterday so maybe I closed it before it finished doing whatever.

Here's a capture of just one of the 932 playlists. I never knew how many I had as iTunes doesn't provide a count (that I'm aware of) so I never really did know, though I figured it was into the hundreds upon hundreds....

Regardless, WE HAVE LIFT-OFF!!! Can you believe it??? Over a year of working together. I never gave you. Neither did you. You're a blessing in my life beyond compare. This is simply no way I could have done this without you. I practically have tears in my eyes I'm so happy. You have no idea.

THANK YOU - THANK YOU - THANK YOU!!!!

WOW!

HAHA! Rick Astley. That's a blast from the past. It is in my iTunes library. That was a #1 record as you may remember (at least stateside).

BTW, this is an example of how I set up my music and make playlists off of.

So the song was #1 and hit #1 on 3/12 in 1988 in Winter (Jan/Feb/Mar). So I create playlists based on that using Smart playlists to start. As a former Program Director of some note (L.A., Houston, San Francisco, etc.) and consultant, VP of Programming, etc., I used different methods when programming music, some of which involved seasonal strategies. So anyway, it's just awesome that this is up and rocking.

I just pray Plex doesn't remove Playlists or whatever, or do some other update that removes all these. Any suggestions on how to protect that? I do have some info on back up Plex settings but not sure if it backs up playlists.

Anyway, sleep well tonight my dear, dear friend. You've made one soul in this world very, very happy. As I said, I'm blessed to have you in my life and this would never have happened without your excellent guidance and input so again, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!

Maybe you know about such things?...

https://support.plex.tv/articles/201539237-backing-up-plex-media-server-data/

https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-backup/635595/3

https://forums.plex.tv/t/backup-plex-metadata-covers-names-playlists-etc/588917

I'm sure there's tons more. I'm just beginning to look into it.

Hello again!

I was playing back music on iTunes and a song was skipping (bad CD burn apparently). Of course it also skipped on Plex. So I burned it again and made sure it was a good copy. I took the .wav file and converted it to ALAC.

I ran the Export/Import script 1.0.0.26 (the last version I used) and followed the steps I always do. Now, here was the challenge:

Using Windows Explorer, I tried to drag it out of the Network DS720 / Artist / Album and it would only want to "copy" to wherever I was going to move it. It would not "move it." So I went into the NAS itself and moved it to the recycle bin. I then moved the new version into the NAS folder where it was. That worked. I then dragged the .txt file onto the E/I script and it was successful (reported some changes). It's now playing correctly. The one thing I noticed was that it didn't carry the rating over to Plex.

Now Plex does show Genres for an artist, but not individual songs. Here are the Genres Plex shows collectively from all the Eagles songs in the library. The "Styles" and "Moods" are not anything I applied to them.

And here is the ratings on the Hotel California individual tracks in Plex:

But there was no rating on the song I replaced. Now I did check the original "Music-Plex" library (Y mapped) that is still in Plex and the song I did for Export/Import doesn't have a rating on it either so perhaps (and very likely) it's because it didn't have a rating to begin with?

Let me pose it this way: Do you see any reason why the Export/Import script wouldn't work with the NAS? I have to move it in and out using the NAS instead of Windows network type of thing. But I think the file remains stable and the "rating" on the song I happened to have to replace could have been a happenchance kind of thing. And I don't see a need to use this script much anymore given that work has been done. It would only be situations where I notice a bad version or something like I did today.

One other question; If I were to use the Y mapped library instead of the volume1 and did the same treatment to the XML file (replacing the second forward slash after localhost and changing the songs to "volume1/music-plex/....") would that work? I don't want (nor need) to muck things up in Plex but I was just curious.

On another note, I'm updating the document I sent you to include more of the steps you used (using the D: drive example) and so forth. I'll send it along via email. If you get a chance to review, great. If not, that's fine of course.

And let me say once again, THANK YOU for your help in getting me over the hump with these playlists. It's been wonderful!!!

I figured as much but wanted to check.

If you have a chance, I'd sure appreciate a reply to my post from Thursday. No biggie, just want to confirm a couple things.

Things have been working great. It's such a joy having my playlists back!! I am doing some fine-tuning as Plex has mistakes here and there but for the most part, it's terrific.

Many thanks as always!

BTW, I am cleaning up quite a bit of metadata in Plex. I noticed many albums that are "unknown". I didn't really notice at first, but I'm pretty sure it's because the XML isn't liking things like ampersand, or a dash (such as "Tribute - Songs of Harry Nilsson") and so forth. So as I'm fixing them in Plex, I'm also fixing/changing in iTunes so that when I update XML next time, it won't replicate things all over again.

Here's an example.

The album is called "Danny Boy & Other Songs I Like To Sing". Here's what it looks like in XML.

<key>Album</key><string>Danny Boy &#38; Other Songs I Like To Sing</string>

I can't think of any other reason.

But it's not just that kind of thing. There are quite a large number of albums that are unknown, even though they are fine in iTunes. An album such as "New Kind Of Feeling" in iTunes is shown to be "Unknown" in Plex, even though the XML shows it fine.

I'm sure it's a function of Plex and trying to figure things out from the XML? What I'm nervous about is that if I update an album such as "New Kind Of Feeling" - which is correct in iTunes and XML - I'm worried that next time I update the XML and bring it into Plex, it's going to show "unknown album" again. I guess I can try to test that but it would really suck if that's the case as there are hundreds of albums that are "unknown".

Thoughts?

Based on some updating/fixing, I wanted to test updating the XML in Plex. It is failing to import. I got that same error message you reported.

Here's what I did

I closed iTunes. I made a copy of the XML file and put it in a different folder and called it "iTunes Library (COPY).xml. I made the proper edits to the XML file. I saved it as iTunes Library.xml.

Then I followed these steps:

1.     I logged out of Plex on the website. 

2.    I went to the Plex Media Server on the NAS and stopped it.

3.     I then uploaded the new updated XML file and replaced/overwrote the existing XML in my Music1 folder on my NAS. I checked on the NAS to make sure it was the newer file (it was) - it had today's date and was only a few minutes old.

4.     I restarted Plex Media Server on the NAS and launched Plex.

5.     I went into Plex and did this Music > ⋮ > Scan Library Files followed by Playlists > ⋮ > Import from iTunes... with the option to Overwrite existing playlists.

After getting the error, I scanned the files again and tried importing again. I also logged out of Plex and stopped, then restarted Plex Media Server on the NAS once again. I then tried again, scanning the files, then tried importing the playlists. I keep getting the error message and the XML is not updating.

One thing I did not do - which was part of your initial instructions when you got things working - was that I did not disable the itunes plugin or remove the XML path. I kept both of those as they were set.

You had unchecked the itunes plugin and then shut off Plex Media server and restart it I have in my notes. Then you added the XML path. Do you think I should do that as well now, again? That doesn't seem logical, but perhaps we need to sort of reset the table so to speak but I'm nervous about doing that as I don't want to lose my playlists for some unexplained reason if this somehow did something.

Can you tell me if you think I did anything wrong here?

Have you tried another album or two and maybe a couple new playlists? I'd be curious to know if yours was successful. BTW, what I did to test to see if it worked was to edit a couple of playlists that were successfully imported. I then changed the name of an album (which had asterisks in the name of it) to see if that came through.

No adverse changes occurred on the attempts to import the playlists or any other music that I could detect. But before I do more work on updating/fine-tuning Plex, I sure would like to know why the updated XML isn't coming in.

This was another comment related to this that you made.

The XML file in your iTunes library folder will be updated each time you make a change to the library, e.g. edit a playlist, add some metadata, or just play a track which increases the play-count.  Plex should detect metadata changes by itself,

but when you want it to update the playlists or you've moved/renamed any files, copy the XML, edit out the unwanted double slashes, save the copy in the volume1/Music1folder as iTunes Library.xml then use Music > ⋮

> Scan Library Files followed by Playlists > ⋮ > Import from iTunes... with the option to Overwrite existing

playlists. The is no point copying the updated file back to C: as Plex isn't going to change it, and you'll want the current version produced by iTunes next time you want to refresh the playlists.

I'D REALLY APPRECIATE IT IF YOU COULD SEE WHAT I'M DOING WRONG AND HOW TO MAKE IT RIGHT.

And just really quickly (if I didn't say this already), the reason I want to test this and make sure it's working is that, if I make a bunch of changes IN Plex but the XML overwrites it (or viceversa), I need to know which way it's behaving.

An obvious comment probably but just wanted to reiterate it.

When you added your library to Plex, did you check the box to "import from iTunes?" That's different than the enable iTunes checkbox where the XML path also is. This was an option when you add the library.

I'm curious.

Hope to hear back. Thanks!!

Here's the screen when you first add a folder/music library to Plex that gives you the option to import iTunes.

I was able to import more playlists as a test today. One step I realized I was missing (as I was unsuccessful for the past few days) was that I wasn't refreshing my NAS folder after putting the updated XML in the folder. That's why nothing happened as the playlists from the original one were already there.

I also tested renaming a folder from iTunes and a couple of other things.

1. Renamed a playlist in iTunes and it imported and it changed in Plex. I changed no music in it whatsoever.
2. I took another playlist in iTunes and changed the order of the songs because I noticed it imported in the wrong sequence (it was a playlist that was based on Billboard magazine's chart position for years (one after another). I did not change the title though but iTunes added it as a second playlist, likely because it detected a difference between the two? (Though no titles were removed, just put in a different order).

I also have to be careful to remember to edit the XML file. I had a mishap this morning when I forgot to do so and lost hundreds of playlists. Once I did the edit and refreshed everything, Plex brought them all back. WHEW!