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Smart Playlists not synching between iTunes on my PC and Apple Music on my Android phone

I recently switched to a phone plan that includes an Apple Music subscription, so I thought I'd try it out in the hope that I could start leaving my iPod at home and just use my phone(Pixel 4XL) for my music in the car. I got the subscription set up, went into iTunes on my Windows laptop and had it sync my library into the cloud. After it was done, I noticed that the regular playlists from my iTunes library show up fine in Apple Music, but the smart playlists are very hit or miss. Some look fine, some are empty. These smart playlists have very simple rules, most are just a combination of the artist name and a minimum rating(i.e. the songs I like most for a particular artist). There doesn't seem to be any consistency in terms of whether the music was purchased on iTunes or imported from .mp3's I ripped from my CD collection. All of my software is up to date(iTunes, Androd, the Apple Music app), and I've tried re-synching, enabling/disabling the Live Update option for the playlist, deleting it an recreating it, but it doesn't work. Doing a search for answers suggests that Apple Music has had a problem importing Smart Playlists for a long time. Can anyone help?

Posted on Mar 30, 2022 3:57 PM

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3 replies

Mar 31, 2022 1:53 PM in response to pdegan2814

Hello pdegan2814,


Welcome to Apple Support Communities. As this issue is happening with some of your smart playlists, let's try to delete just one of the affected smart lists, then add it back again on iTunes on your PC as a test. Let us know if that helps.


Also, check out these helpful links:


Create, delete, and use Smart Playlists in iTunes on PC

Turn on Sync Library with Apple Music

Use Apple Music with your Android devices


We hope this information is useful. Kind regards.

Apr 1, 2022 8:26 AM in response to nbotros

As I mentioned in my original post, I did try deleting and recreating one of my Smart Playlists. In fact, I watched on my Android phone as the list disappeared from the Apple Music app and then reappeared when I recreated the list. The criteria were very simple: "Artist contains Sabaton" and "Rating in the range of 3 stars to 5"(and yes, there are several tracks in that range in my library). These songs appear in the Smart Playlist in my iTunes app on my Windows laptop, and they appear in my Library in the Apple Music app on my Android phone. But the playlist is empty in the Apple Music app. Most if not all of these songs are ones that I purchased in the iTunes store. It's not just this artist, and in some Smart Playlists on the Apple Music app the track list isn't empty but it's incomplete. There appears to be no consistency in the iCloud Status of the missing vs visible songs in the Smart Playlists, whether they're Purchased, Matched or Uploaded. If I take all of the songs from the example Smart Playlist I mentioned above and add them to a new static Playlist, then pull THAT list up in Apple Music, all the tracks are there. None of my static Playlists appear to be missing tracks.

Smart Playlists not synching between iTunes on my PC and Apple Music on my Android phone

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