iTunes 9 Smart Playlist Sort Order Not Copied to iPhone...

Heres what worked for me.

created a new smart playlist with the following conditions:
date added - is not in the last - 1 - days
media kind - is - music

*match only checked items - checked*
* no work around if the song was just added *

synced iphone. worked. end of story.

This worked perfectly. Keep in mind I did nothing else. The default playlist is 25. I only added Playlist is Music and change the number.




Message was edited by: bobnatcho

ooooh it worked!!! thank you so much! you are rockin.

I am surprised that this widely reported bug that appeared prior to iPhone OS 3.1 is still going on. There are many threads on this one. The workaround about explicitly stating it is music works IF IT IS MUSIC, but doesn't on podcasts.

A workaround reported in other threads is the "Live Updating" flag. Every day now, I get my podcasts, then uncheck Live Updating before I sync. Then everything is on my Touch in the right order. I then go back and check it again so that the Smart Playlist gets updated the next day. This is a ridiculous set of steps on a bug that has gone through two patch cycles.

Thank you, your workaround fixed the order of my podcasts. How annoying that Apple couldn't fix a known (and for podcast users very annoying) bug.

Does this mean that you cannot include podcasts in smart playlists now? I managed to upgrade successfully to iTunes 9.0.1 this weekend, and all my playlists and music ratings were there. Great relief. However, I was surprised to see that my podcast playlists do not copy over to my iPod when I sync... A major bummer as I use them all the time when I'm away from my computer.

A Canuck wrote:
Does this mean that you cannot include podcasts in smart playlists now?

Yes you can, but now you have to include them via the Playlists section on the Podcasts tab instead of managing all playlists on the one tab.

tt2

"Yes you can, but now you have to include them via the Playlists section on the Podcasts tab instead of managing all playlists on the one tab.

tt2"

tt2:
I was thrilled when I saw your answer. Unfortunately, I can find no Playlists section on a Podcasts tab, except under my iPod in iTunes itself. The content of those Playlists does get synced to my iPod, but the actual playlist does not.. Does me no good, unless I sit at my PC to play my podcasts. Darn.

Ah, good point... sorry.
😟

tt2

tt2:

I found another thread that discussed this exact problem, and a link was provided to this:

http://www.manager-tools.com/forums-4297

About half-way down, there is a paragraph that starts "In iTunes 9.0...". I followed the instructions there, and my podcast playlists are now showing in my iPod. Yay!

Thanks for your help.

I had success with Podcasts. I wanted two playlists of podcasts in reverse chronological order: (a) Podcasts by date released, and (b) Podcasts by date added.

The Smart Playlist definition for both is the same, but the sort-order within the playlist is different. I just click on the column headings to get the desired sort order, of course.

The definition is:

[X] Match [all] of the following rules:
[Playlist] [is not] [Music]
[Media Kind] [is] [Podcast]
[X] Match only checked items
[X] Live updating


This is iPhone OS 3.1.2 and iTunes 9.0.1.

A limitation: the "Playlist is not music" excludes any Podcast that lists itself as music. But most of mine are spoken word.

The 'set playlist to music / not music' workaround doesn't really work, as it simply turns the playlist from a smart playlist to a standard (static) playlist. This is due to ANOTHER long-unpatched bug in the music app, where any smart playlists that use the 'playlist is..' attribute get copied to the ipod/iphone as a standard playlist.

If you want a sorted playlist that dynamically updates itself on your ipod (such as 'songs I've not played in a while, sorted by artist' in my case), you won't get it with this workaround.