Import .m3u music playlists to PLEX on a Synology NAS

Hi POWERUSR and others,

Here is my contribution addressing the above tutorial’s Step 2. I wrote a small bash script for those who aren’t necessarily programming savvy and would like an automated solution that processes .m3u files, automating Step 2 entirely.

Please be careful and follow the instructions accordingly, nonetheless running bash scripts you don’t understand is NEVER recommended for security reasons which can result in security breaches or even full data loss. Use at your own risk, my intent and script aren’t ill intended but I do need to make this disclaimer before someone accidently clears their drive and blame me. If you can put 2+2 together and was able to follow the above, you should not have problem’s.

On your synology NAS UI, if you go to Control Panel > Task Scheduler > Create > User Defined Script, which should open a pop-up window called Create Task.

General Tab:
Task is where you give this any desired identifying name for this task.
User is a tricky one, depends on how you setup the users permissions… I have one user with admin rights, so I used that.
Enable needs to be ticket on for the script to be “active” or enabled.

Schedule Tab:
This is where you set how often you want this script to run. This varies between different people, I have it run every day because I update my playlists often and export them from my music app where I actually manage my entire music library. So having it run daily makes sense to me because I export the m3u files to a specific folder and forget about it, when ever I decide I need the updated playlists in plex (every other month) I can just run the POSTMAN calls and the latest m3u files already formatted are in place ready to be used by POSTMAN.

Task Settings:
Notifications – this part is pretty self explanatory.
Run command – bash cmd + file path for YOUR edited version of the script, it needs to be on your synology NAS. What you paste in that box should look something like the below, including the quotations marks.

/bin/bash “/volume1/Plex/MyScriptVersion.bash”

And that should be all.

Before doing the above you will need to copy the below and save it as a BASH file, that can be done using any text editor (not word) like Window’s and Mac’s native ones or a very popular and powerful one called Notepad++ (which I highly recommend). Before closing the text editor, look for “YOUR INPUT IS REQUIRED” lines which require your attention and input.

The script is pretty self explanatory and I’ve limited what you need to copy and paste everything BETWEEN the lines full of question marks (?????????) to create your own bash file, don’t forget to edit the file and then save. (Pasting the below in the run command will not work, you need to create a bash script file)
??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
#!/bin/bash

# Source folder where .m3u files are located. Edit here, YOUR INPUT IS REQUIRED:
source_folder=”/Source/Directory/Use/Forward/Slashes”

# Destination folder after changes. Edit here, YOUR INPUT IS REQUIRED:
destination_folder=”/Destination/Directory/Use/Forward/Slashes”

# Ensure the destination folder exists; create it if it doesn’t
mkdir -p “$destination_folder”

# Create or overwrite the “m3uNameList” file in the destination folder
touch “${destination_folder}/m3uNameList.txt”

# Iterate through .m3u files in the source folder
find “$source_folder” -type f -name “*.m3u” -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d ” file; do
# Get the filename without path
filename=$(basename “$file”)

# Replace all single backslashes with single forward slashes and replace for [ROOT] directory from Step 2 (form POWRUSR above)
# To avoid using regular expressions, I took a simple approach. My m3u is initially exported with the songs directories
# in a format like below (where DS1621 is my Synology Nas network name):
# \\DS1621\Music\iTunes 2\iTunes Music\The Kooks\Inside in Inside Out\05 Ooh La.mp3
# \\DS1621\Music\iTunes 2\iTunes Music\The Kooks\Inside in Inside Out\02 See the World.mp3
# \\DS1621\Music\iTunes 2\iTunes Music\The Kooks\Inside in Inside Out\07 She Moves in Her Own Way.mp3
# \\DS1621\Music\iTunes 2\iTunes Music\Scissor Sisters\Ta-Dah [2CD Deluxe Edition]\10 The Other Side.mp3
#
# Given plex expects something in this “/volume1/Music/iTunes 2/iTunes Music/” format
# we need to set below what is your [UN-EDITED] for the [EDITED] path.
# If [UN-EDITED] = //DS1621/Music/iTunes 2/iTunes Music/
# then
# [EDITED] = /volume1/Music/iTunes 2/iTunes Music/
# based on the above examples the command should look like:
# sed ‘s#\\#/#g; s#//DS1621/Music/iTunes 2/iTunes Music/#/volume1/Music/iTunes 2/iTunes Music/#’ “$file” > “${destination_folder}/${filename}”

# Edit here, YOUR INPUT IS REQUIRED:
sed ‘s#\\#/#g; s#[UN-EDITED]#[UN-EDITED]#’ “$file” > “${destination_folder}/${filename}”

# Log the filename (including file extension) to m3uNameList.txt
echo “$filename” >> “${destination_folder}/m3uNameList.txt”

# Remove the original .m3u file
rm “$file”

echo “Processed and moved ${filename} to ${destination_folder}”
done

echo “All .m3u files processed and moved to ${destination_folder}”
???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Hope this helps.
POWRUSR feel free to edit or incorporate this in a friendlier format to your above tutorial if you are so inclined. Once again thanks for your initial input.

Thank you so much for posting this, so I have followed all the steps.

I was initially coming across an error in postman “Cloud Agent Error: Can not send requests to reserved address. Make sure address is publicly accessible or select a different agent.”

This was happening via the web version, so decided to use the desktop version of Postman to check and I get the “200 OK” result however nothing is appearing in my plex playlists?

I am using a synology so all slashes within the m3u are /. I have checked the file paths in the m3u against the synology path and they match

Any tips?