iTuens 9 - Recently Added all mixed up

I have observed the same behavior. Best I can tell, it is happening with smart playlists. I have a smart playlist that grabs most recent 250 songs added to my library, and it's sorted on the Mac by date added. When this playlist is synced to the iPhone, it's sorted differently, but I can't discern the sort order. Regular playlists seem to be sorting correctly.

I know this doesn't help much but i'm getting the same problem with all of my iTunes Smart lists (Top Rated, Recently Added etc) after upgrading to iTunes 9 and iPhone OS 3.1. The songs appear how I want them to in iTunes but on my iPhone 3G with iPhone OS 3.1 they are all mixed up.

I hope Apple fixes this really quickly because it is very annoying.

Further analysis is showing that the same smart playlist appearing on both the iPhone and on the Mac in fact has different songs. It would appear that not only is the sort order off, they differ in terms of tracks. The number of songs is the same though. Hmmmm. Can anyone confirm that I'm correct?

Just to confirm: I'm using iTunes 9 and iPhone OS 3.1.

Message was edited by: samdale67

I've seen this in the past but not now. I'm running iTunes 9 and 3.1 on my iPhone 3GS. The smart playlists look as they do on iTunes in the same order.

Problem confirmed here too. Looks like the iPod software on the iPhone is sorting the smart playlists on it's own instead of just listenng to what iTunes on the computer tells it. It's sorted mine in alphabetical order based on artist name instead of how it shows up on my computer which is by date added.

This could be iPhone os 3.1 or iTunes 9 problem so I would do the old "SEND FEEDBACK" to both of them.

I've noticed this problem with my smart playlists of podcasts, which I like to sort in order of release date or date added. In my case, I'm finding a different number of episodes (songs) in each smart playlist on the iPhone compared to iTunes. Interestingly, when I have the iPhone attached to iTunes and look at the playlist there, the tracks are sorted the way I want them (although there are fewer tracks). But on the iPhone, I can't figure out what order they are sorted in. I've reported this bug, and hope others will too:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

Add another to the list. SUPER SUPER ANNOYING APPLE. I thought your stuff was trouble free?

Same problem here, though i have noticed this issue on OS 3.0! I tried making new sets of smart playlists and removing ALL the music on my phone to adding several songs to the list... one of them used to work, but now they are just messed up! :/

EDIT
I think this issue is caused by the iPhone itself, not iTunes. Expanding the list by clicking, for example, "Owie's iPhone" under "Devices" and looking through the playlist you will see that they are all fine... so it means that iTunes has done it's job properly, but it's the iPod.app that messed it all up! 😟



*EDIT 2*
There seems to be a temporary fix! right click on the Smart Playlist and click "Edit Smart Playlist" then uncheck "Live updating"

It's not THE final fix, but it'll do for now i guess...

Message was edited by: owie007

having the exact same problem - and it would be one thing if the iphone appeared to be sorting them via some internal system, but they're not alphabetical by title or artist, and they're not sorted by date (and since I like to listen to my podcasts from oldest to newest, this is INCREDIBLY annoying).

Turning off live updating worked for me. The problem is that i relied on live updating to get rid of the songs or podcasts in my smart playlist once I listened to them. This needs to get fixed ASAP.

I've got an iPod classis (80 Gb) and both smart & normal playlists are either out-of-order or missing entries.

Huh. When I uncheck "Live updating" from my podcast playlist and resync, the playlist disappears entirely from the iPhone.

I think the iPhone is trying to do the smart playlist logic onboard now, rather than relying on iTunes. I noticed that after I listened to a podcast it disappeared from a smart playlist which has the criterion "Play Count is 0".

I guess this is cool, but it's too bad it screws up the sorting. Also, the "Updating Library" after each sync is getting longer and longer and more and more annoying.

I have the same issue Michael Mills2 described - namely that my podcasts and other smart playlists are sorted incorrectly on the phone. I tried unchecking Live Updating to see if that would help, but it did not. I have reported this as a bug to Apple.

I have to confirm this too. I have a smart playlist which selects my songs ordered by added date descending order. In iTunes this is correctly displayed but on my iPhone (OS 3.1) the order is messed up. Using iTunes 9 and Snow Leopard.