Music Playlist order on iPhone different than MacBook Pro

Hello Karina, any thoughts?

I have the same exact problem, I can't find any way to sort the songs within a Playlist, no matter what I do at iTunes or iPhone directly, I just can't sort by name. Any help?

It is just a shame that Apple is unable (or unwilling) to implement song sorting functionality in the App like e.g. Spotify does. I can't believe I have to use iTunes on my PC/Mac every time I add new title to sort them in my playlist again.

Same issue, and this is a pretty fundamental problem for me fully adopting Apple Music. I've migrated all my playlists over from Spotify, but the fact that I do not have the ability to sort these playlists is maddening. When I follow the steps above, the sorting of the playlist on the Mac side doesn't seem to have any bearing on the iPhone end. It defaults to user order in the playlist on the Mac side. E.g. the original order of the playlist sorted Ascending. What ultimately is missing is sorting on the Apple Music app, which would then let you at least sort by artist / album / title or reverse the "manual" order either ascending / descending.

This is the answer. Unfortunately the feature to directly do so on your device was removed.

open iTunes

click on your playlist

click view in the top left

click sort by

Just spent way too long trying to find it. This is what I get for not having added new music to my library for a long time.

This is so frustrating - I have a variety of smart playlists that always updated to the song order that they were in on iTunes... now, with Music, you never know what you're going to get. I've tried removing, recreating, resorting, copying to play oder, and they all seem to work... but then don't. Honestly, it seems like the iOS and MacOS teams have different ideas of what "alphabetically" means - the playlists themselves are in a different order on my phone and Music (on MacOS), which I've learned to live with, but is so stupid. I wouldn't care which way they choose to define the alphabet, I just want it to be predictable on my phone.

The solution offered by other users doesn't really seem to work for me, I have re-sorted the playlist on my computer and re-synced to my phone, and the playlist song order is still reversed or in some random order.

Weird how Apple spends so much effort trying to get me to switch/pay for Apple Music but ignores the simplest functionality and bugs that make it so I would happily pay them instead of Spotify. Spotify doesn't have smart playlists or support half the functionality of iTunes/Music, but at least it is consistent and the idea of switching only to be frustrated is totally off-putting.

Thanks but unfortunately that defeats the purpose of using a smart playlist. I have two theories - first, all the playlists that I made originally in iTunes work fine, only the new ones I created in Music give me trouble. Second, the smart playlists work for a little while them stop updating and switch to some default order - usually “most played”. I just delete and recreate the smart playlist with the same rules and use it until I have to do it again. Stupid. Apple should just give full control to other apps that care enough to give us what we want, like Marvis or Cs.

This is such an absurd design flaw from Apple! Really shocked when i was discovering this on my own, somewhat comforted by the shared anguish in this thread, but nowhere near compensation for this complete breakdown in software philosophy and execution.

I am having the same issue. I have my playlists sorted by title when I go into itunes on my macbook but cant get it to sort on my iphone that way - why is this so dificult?

Same issue, amazing that this basic functionality is missing.

I cannot see anything that says ‘sort’. I need my songs back in alpha order,, don’t know how they got out place

I just recently noticed this issue has anyone found a solution for it yet?

btw I am also trying to sort by artist.

Seems to me like Apple just don't care about this very simple yet VERY frustrating issue... a huge library goes terrible because you just can't arrange it. Oh well...

Any comments?

This feature used to exist. I have old playlists that send their order to my iphone, but the newest ones I've made don't. Why in the world would this functionality be removed? So frustrating.

Hi Dean,

Can you provide an answer to this issue please? just like everyone else, I want to sort the songs within a playlist, NOT the playlist itself.

Thanks.