In iTunes Match, why are Smart Playlists messed up?

My iTunes library is all messed up since turning on iTunes match. Anything that I play on my iPhone does not update the play counts on the master music collection on my laptop. Since I rely on these playcounts to update my last.fm profile, this is proving most annoying. Also, for some reason, none of my playlists now sync to the iPhone, they appear fine on the laptop, but they just don't appear on the phone; I have no idea why.

My iTunes library is an integral part of my life; I just want it to work properly again. I have a backed up version that is just a few weeks old on an external hard drive. Should I revert to it, and turn off iTunes match? What do you reckon people?

Here is an update.

I submitted a ticket to Appl's developer bug report a month ago, and yesterday I got this encouraging response that shows Apple is trying to fix this.

"

Engineering has provided the following information:

We believe this issue has been resolved through changes to our production servers.

Please let us know if that has resolved the issue for you.

Unfortunately for me, it not only is not fixed, but matters are worse because I can no longer see any playlists on my IOS devices.

Neither of my IOS devices (iPhone 4S and iPad 2) look any different in terms of the order of tracks in synced smartlists created in iTunes -- they are still completely random.

I tried going into settings/music on my iPad and toggling iTunes match off, then on again. I got the warning that all my tracks would be replaced and I said OK. Then the playlists all disappeared and most of the songs that were not already on the iPad either did not show up, and/or the album art was lost.

I then tried re-opening my "master" iTunes on my iMac and it said that I needed to log out of iTunes and then log back in. I did that, and after about an hour, it said that iCloud was now up to date.

I then repeated the process of toggling iTunes Match on and off on the IOS devices. I also rebooted them. I left the iPad running overnight and in the morning, still nothing had changed.

So now I not only don't have the order fixed in smartlists on IOS, but all playlists (including the "dumb" playlists that were working before) no longer appear on IOS.

The Playlists are still performing properly in iTunes -- both on my "master" iMac that is serving as an iTunes Server for my house, and on my MacPro which has pulled everything down from iCloud/iTunes match.

When I toggle the setting "Show all music" off, the playlists show up again on the iPad, but not the album art or the tracks that are in the Cloud. The when I toggle it back on, the playlists are still there, as well as all the tracks on iCloud, but the jumbled smartlist order is still jumbled.

Yep my playlists still broken 😟 Some are empty and those that have songs in them are all in the wrong order.

James

As of today, I'm giving up. I'll check back in with Match in a year or so and see if it's fixed. I just don't think it's worth it for me to not be able to use the majority of my playlists. Does anybody know, is there a place I can go on the Apple Web site to cancel my account without having to contact phone support?

This is not what I expected from Apple. 'till now it *****. I hope is gettin better later on, but 4 hours for 100 songs is not nice when you've got 19000.

Well. It seems to a certain degree my smart playlists actually come up on my Apple TV, only thing off is the way they are ordered, like with Recently Added, from new to old is old to new. On my 4S, it shows all the recently added on the phone itself.

The service has it's querks, but I'm still more than happy with the way the service upgraded nearly all of my songs to the iTunes 256 kbps m4a versions of the music; I would've payed $25 just to be able to do that. As I see it, the cloud service was just the extra feature that came with it.

I tried my best to fit my iPhone music syncing experience through other ways using the iTunes Match, but I simply cannot live without smart playlists based on other playlists. Also, I want the ability to download a particular song automatically to my iPhone when I add it to a specific playlist in my mac. I know this happens if you buy a song, but I regularly add my existing music from the library to a playlist and then certain playlists sync to my phone.

I guess it's not yet time for a cord free syncing yet as even WiFi syncing takes forever because of some genius data syncing taking forever

If you want to use Smart Playlists, my advice to you is to abandon iTunes Match for now - at least on your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch. My playlists seem OK on my Macbook - and I have left it on my Apple TV as basically the test case (I check back every now and then to see if my "Top 25 Most Played" actually has 25 songs or 4,528. Last time I checked it was 4,528.

It's finally fixed today with iTunes 10.6 update and iOS 5.1 updates!

Still doesn't work for me.

Have updated iTunes to 10.6 and iPhone to 5.1 and re-did iTunes Match on PC and turned iTunes Match on iPhone off and on again.

James

Are smart playlists working for you now?

All smart playlists are correct on my iPhone and iPad. I turned off iTunes match on my iPad (i never had it activated on my iPhone). Waited for all playlists to delete themselves. Closed "music". Rebooted my iPad. Updated iTunes Match in iTunes. Turned back on iTunes match on my iPad and then all smart playlists came down perfectly. I turned it on for my iPhone and the same results happened - all smart playlists came down perfect. I use a Mac Mini as my main computer and have an iPad 2 and an iPhone 4 as an FYI. All have the latest software updates applied.

Just followed your steps @nmavianoand still no luck; my smart playlists are still empty on my iPhone.

James

It has improved, but only a tiny amount. Playlists with hundreds of items in them now have 3 or 4 items in them instead of zero!