iPod Touch Playist not sorting properly

I'm having this problem too, but only since updating to 3.1.2. My Top Rated is now in a seemingly completely random order - it's not sorting it by song name, artist name, rating, or album name, anyways. In iTunes, it's sorted by rating (forced) and then by artist name (seemingly by default, which works for me).

I've tried removing the playlist from the iPod and putting it back on, but it was still in the same order as it was beforehand.

I'm having the same problems with my touch (upgraded to 3.1.2). It has completely changed all my smart playlists. It seems to have reversed the settings (from best to worst, from latest to oldest). I have tried to fix this error but to no avail. When I now try to use the Nike+ app to go for a run, I have to listen to my oldest and worst songs.
Also before I upgraded, some apps that I had paid for became unusable until I paid for the upgrade to the software. Now the Apps appear to work, but the syncing of Podcasts seems to be very strange as well. A completely manual version of iTunes is what I want to be released. Give me complete control over everything from now on with one option in Preferences.
How can Apple release such bodged software is beyond me. I have been more than happy with my Apple products (having bought 4 generations of iPod over the years) but this is infuriating!
Btw - Rant over.

Message was edited by: ross_p

This has been talked about a lot lately on these boards. It is a bug in 3.x and there is a workaround (though not convenient). If you want a smart playlist on the Touch to contain the same songs as the playlist in iTunes (and be sorted the same way) you need to edit the playlist criteria. The easiest thing to do is to add the criteria "Playlist -- Is -- Music", where "Music" is the general folder for music items. This will break Live Updating since the Music folder cannot be sync'd to the Touch, but it will resolve the playlist contents and sort order. Each time you re-sync the Touch, the playlist will do a Live Update.

You can solve this other ways too by intentionally breaking Live Updating, e.g. un-check the Live Updating option in the playlist definition, but the problem with that is that the playlist won't update the next time you sync.

This works for Podcast sorting too, except you must add "playlist is NOT Music" to your Smart Playlist.

OMG... I've been looking for an answer to this for months it seems. I listen to a lot of the TWiT podcasts and I like to listen in the order they are released. My smart playlist always sorted them, on the iPod Touch, in whatever order it felt like it. I couldn't even figure out the sort order. Now they're sorted properly. Thank you so much for this tip.

And yes, Apple, please fix this. Please give us some way to sort on the iPod Touch. I like listening to whole artist discographies and there's no way to sort by album release date. The albums are sorted alphabetically. Why? Who decided alpha within artist was the best (and only) way to sort? For a company that focuses so much on UI they need to work on this.

I see this is still an issue. My best advice is to downgrade to 3.0, that's what I did.

Finally, a work around. Thanks. Another method is to create a second smart playlist that links to the playlist with the podcasts you want to sort (i.e. create playlist XYZ with whatever rules you want, then create another one with one rule: Playlist IS XYZ. When you sort the podcasts in the second list the order is correct. But this is simpler, more elegant. I noticed, however, that two of my podcasts disappeared from the playlist when I did this. I assume that is because I added them from a different computer before I made this change. Curious that Apple would let a bug like this continue to exist. It's been months.