Playlist – Manual Migration

If you ever move you content around on disk after you have already created playlists you will need to either rebuild those playlist using the Web GUI or you can manually edit the individual text files that hold the playlist info. This tutorial will cover how to manually edit your playlist info.

The files that hold playlist information are stored in the “data\playlists” folder which is directly under your Emby Server folder.

If on Windows it can look something like:

C:\Users\SomeUserNameHere\AppData\Roaming\MediaBrowser-Server\data\playlists

An easy way to find this folder on ANY OS Emby runs on is to go to your Web Dashboard and scroll down the right side until you get to the PATHS section which will look something like this:

If you look at either the LOGS or METADATA entries and remove the last part of the folder name you would have (in this example):

C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Roaming\MediaBrowser-Server\

Add “data\playlists” to the end of that line to arrive at: C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Roaming\MediaBrowser-Server\data\playlists

This folder will contain your list of playlists which will look something like this:

Each of these folders represents one playlist. If we enter a folder such as the War [playlist] shown above we will have a few files that will look similar to this.

You can see we have a poster.jpg as well as the playlist.xml file which will hold the information we plan to edit. You can edit this with any text edit such as NotePad or Notepad++. We’ll use Windows Notepad in this example of our Lawyer playlist:

Once opened in Notepad we’ve scrolled down to the section that looks like the above picture showing one or more files that have been added to the playlist.

You can now edit the file location as needed.

Save your changes in Notepad and repeat for the next playlist you need to change.

NOTE: Please make sure the paths you use exactly match the way you set your library up. If for example you setup your library using: "D:\movies" but your current playlists have "\\server\movies" this will not work. Make sure you are consistent and use either drive letters or UNC style paths for both the libraries and the playlists.

When you are finished editing your playlists, please run a library update by clicking the "Scan All Libraries" button at the top of the Library menu page.