Smart playlist not showing up on iPhone after iTunes upgrade to 9.1

I am having the same issue. Just started. Some playlists aren't there. And some are there, but with no content. I tried synching the whole music library, and the same issue. All the music is there, just not the playlists. Anyone know if there is a fix?

I've been complaining about this issue for months now. It just suddenly stopped syncing the smart playlists properly and in some cases removed all the content from the device whilst leaving the playlist full within iTunes.
The workarounds are lame too. It's suggested to remove the live updating option on the playlist - which pretty much makes the 'smart' part redundant... Whilst this does seem to update the songs to the playlist on the device, you have to deselect and select every time you want to sync the device properly.
It's about time this was sorted...

Thanks for the work around -- truly a pain, but it did work. Strangely, I am only having problems with selective smart playlists but can't tell any real difference between the ones that work with live updating and the ones that don't.

Thanks for the work around. It did work! I appreciate it.

I had this problem too - the playlist was selectable on the iPhone, but didn't contain any tracks. The tracks were synced and could be played by browsing album/song/composer etc. but the playlist appeared empty.

I narrowed it down to a smart playlist that had one "Genre contains ..." criteria. I added an additional criteria that wouldn't affect the playlist ("Date added is after 1984/1/1") and now it works, even with live updating.

Others have reported a similar problem with smart playlists if they only contain a single genre-type criteria.

I just talked to an Apple product specialist and I think we figured out what's going on. Apparently, Apple has decided that certain playlists should show in the Podcast section of your device's information instead of the Music section, based on the content of the playlist. The smart playlist that was missing for me in the Music section only contained podcasts and it now shows on the Podcasts tab. That is why the podcasts were sync'ed correctly even though the playlist seemed to be missing. I don't know if this explains the problem for other people. It would be nice if Apple would explain when they change the rules like this.

It's not as simple as that. I hope Apple fixes this ASAP. I have only 7 playlists I use. I use so few because they are all smart and update automatically. Equally, this problem appeared to pop up just recently, so I don't know what triggered it. I even went so far as to assume that my library was corrupted. Since nothing I tried worked, I tried deleting my library. Headaches!!! I recovered my music, but all my ringtones were gone. So were all the apps that synced to my iPhone (my music goes on my iPod, my apps and data to my iPhone). The apps on the iPhone recovered back to my iTunes library, but ONLY the apps on my iPhone. I had some apps I had paid for that I did not currently use. I guess they are gone. Even after all that, the smart playlist problem persists.

Aaaaanyway, my experience was a little different. Even though I haven't reproduced the behaviour exactly, it is my impression that the last smart playlist modified is the one that doesn't show up on the iPod. As a thought experiment, created a new playlist called Test and duplicated one of my seven playlists. I synced, and the 7th playlist now shows up on my iPod! The 8th one, called Test, only shows on iTunes, but not on my iPod. Since all 7 playlists are now displaying on my iPod, I will leave things alone until Apple fixes this latest unanticpated design characteristic.

In my case, I found a way of making my Smart Playlists show up on my iPhone WITHOUT having to disable Live Updating. Basically, I found that any Smart Playlist that contains an "Is Not" or "Does Not Contain" clause will not show up properly on my iPhone after syncing. This can be for any field, such as Genre or Media Kind. Hopefully others can try removing any of these conditional clauses and see if it helps.

I only had 1 smart playlist that wasn't showing (although all the music from it was still on the phone) and it was "Genre contains metal".

Taking the live updating off worked....I must have left it on by accident because I've been leaving them off since the order of the songs was getting changed a while ago.

Turning Live updating off seems to be the go.....just turn it on when you add new music to the library and off once it's in the playlist(s) you want

I've been having issues like everyone else. I only make Smart Playlists. And needing to uncheck live update is ridiculous. I would just like to know why this problem hasn't been fixed yet. I about 7 empty smart playlist. And the common thread b/w them is that they are categorized by certain genres. Jazz/Blues. Pop/Folk/Rock. Instrumentals. etc... They are all empty on the iPod and not synched properly.

Please fix ASAP.