Playlists missing from Smart Playlist drop-down

Hi, thanks 🙂 but that's the first thing I tried (probably should have mentioned it in my post).

Even if I make a new playlist with nothing or something else in it, and call it "Workout", or any of the other ones (Cardio, Recent, etc.), all of a sudden it becomes invisible in the drop-down in Smart Playlists.

If I move it somewhere else — like inside another folder (refer below to see how I've organized) — it still gets ignored. It just doesn't like the names for some reason... happened after upgrading to Lion (though I did a clean install and dragged over my iTunes folder from a Time Machine backup).

Perhaps instead I should restore from the backup differently? For example, open the ~/Music folder, then open Time Machine.app, and restore that folder through that? I always thought that manually dragging the "Latest" backup from the disk should do the trick the same way? Or can files be somehow excluded?

Though I don't see how it could have caused this problem — as for example, all of my songs and everything (old or new) did get transfered over.

The new update for iTunes did not help: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1426

I tried all of those except re-installing iTunes... I'm running on a Mac. Should I just delete the iTunes.app?

Is there a way to just make iTunes reset itself somehow.. something similar to how you can start iPhoto by holding down a few keys and reset thumbnails, caches, etc.?

Somehow make iTunes check itself and the library?

It should rebuild the iTunes library.itlfile using the iTunes library.xml file.

Do you mean that it should show my iTunes library exactly how it was before? Because it doens't, it looks as if I'd have bought a new Mac without any music.

If it doesn't, File > Library > Import playlist and select /Music/iTunes/iTunes library.xml.

Will rebuilding based on the xml file put everything back the same way, e.g., date added, etc.?

Thanks. By the way, I had an intricate network of Smart Playlists set up — and thought perhaps that's the problem. What I did was find out which playlists weren't showing, and duplicate them — leaving their names as the new one. I then went and updated all the playlists that needed updating to suit the new ones. Deleted the old ones and took a look. The results are interesting.

Here is what was invisible before (marked red):

(basically, the playlists in the "Smartly Recent" folder at the bottom generally used the normal playlists in the "Original" folder as their sources, plus a few gimmicks — like only the most recently added, etc.)

So after all that tweaking and re-doing I did... all of them became visible. So it can't be the rules I'm applying... it just doens't like the names! Blacklisted...

(I have an iPod shuffle, and have limited space, so that's why I have these intricate playlists.)

Figured it out! This is not a solution, but basically, I found that all of a sudden iTunes (in Lion) doesn't like playlists that are called the same name... even if they're in different folders, and even if one is a Smart Playlist and the other just a regular Playlist.

The solution, for now: rename the playlists to be something different (even putting a space after the name works).

(Even a Playlist Folder and a Playlist can't be called the same.)