Smart Playlists Sort Order Wrong

Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is the only solution that works. Me, instead of "random" i've chosen "artist" this is the order I want, and this is the one that appears on iTunes on my Mac but "magically " shuffles on iPhone, even though it's not on a shuffle mode. Whatever. Thank you for the idea.

But the sense of the "smart" playlist that the one haven't to drag songs manually. I use smart playlists selecting songs automatically by genre, or my ranking ("loved") - and expect them to be sorted by artist like it was before it went wrong.

Dude! You are a genius. Here we are in 2017, almost 2018, & I had this identical issue. Then I found your old post & sure enough. It worked! Wow. I can't thank you enough.

The solution was "...to add "Playlist is Music" as a rule for the Smart Playlist..."

You rock.

I've a similar problem with music Smart Playlists. Looks good in iTunes. Looks good when I look at my iPhone from within iTunes. Looks all wonky when I actually play the list on my iPhone.

My solution: Adding "Playlist is Music" seems to solve the problem. I have no idea why.

Let me know if this helps at all.

I had this same problem! I created a Smart Playlist in iTunes and manually put my songs in a specific order. However, when I synched to my iPhone 4 the order was broken. Instead, iPhone synched the songs by artist in alphabetical order. I saw on other threads that a possible solution to this problem is to add "Playlist is Music" as a rule for the Smart Playlist. However, after repeated effort this did not work for me until I did one more thing: check the box on "Match only checked items". Finally, after hours of trying to find a solution online it is now in proper working order.

Here's the screenshot:

PS. As some point along the way I also tried right clicking on the name of the Smart Playlist and selected "Copy to Play Order." I don't know if this had any effect, but since I tried multiple things I thought I'd disclose just in case this is important. But I can tell you the combo of "Playlist is Music" + "Copy to Play Order" alone didn't work. 😁

I know this thread is pretty dead, but I stumbled upon it when having a similar problem and never found an up to date solution. This threat, however, did lead me to tinkering with the smart playlist settings and I found the key in my case was the "Limit to" and "Selected by" fields. I rely heavily on the Recently Added smart playlist because I have a tendency to by music at times I can't listen to it, and that playlist was always an awesome way to go back and hear what I've recently added to the collection. However, the same issue described caused the Recently Added playlist to list tracks in reverse – maddening! If someone wants to hear their most recent additions, they don't want to start with the ones they bought 3 months ago and scroll down. Totally counter-intuitive.

Anyway! – for me what fixed it was changing the "limit to" field to (whatever you want; in my case a few hundred) and "selected by" from [random] to [most recently added]. Made complete sense once I did it, but it used to do it automatically and it's poorly documented if at all. I hope this helps some poor soul with a similar issue!

Wow thanks jfq4u ! Days of searches and you fixed this MOST ANNOYING BUG ! Bless 🙂

This helped me, thank you so much!

To reorder songs in a SMART playlist, first SELECT ALL the songs, then UNCHECK all the songs, then you can drag and drop the songs in the preferred order. When done, you might want to SELECT ALL and then CHECK the songs again. Hope this is helpful. Took some time to figure it out!