Smart Playlists not syncing correctly to iPhone/iPad with iTunes Match

I sent a mail to Tim Cook last friday regarding several issues with iTunes Match (including the smart playlist issue).

I got an answer today from an Apple representative in Ireland, with whom I then had a phonecall.

Tomorrow an iOS specialist will check the issues with me. Maybe and hopefully we all will soon get a bugfix for that problem. 🙂

So, I got the call yesterday evening (as it was postponed).

We checked some settings, and I described the problems I have (i.e. the playlist problem).

The specialist told me that she will forward the informations to a technician and that I will get another call friday afternoon.

The summary is that my problems with iTunes Match (and also the here discussed playlist problem) were unknown to Apple as far as I understood the specialist.

I will keep you updated.

Thanks for the update! I hope this is fixed soon as I rely mostly on smart playlists 😟

Kinda shocking that Apple is unaware of these issues. In fact, I call BS on it. There's no way they released iTunes Match without knowing about issues with syncing playlists. Keep us updated.

The workaround that I have been using is to create a non-smart playlist. I then mark the podcasts in the smart playlist and right click and then add to the newly created non-smart playlist. Then I just play the non-smart playlist on my device. It's clunky, but it seems to wrok.

Yeah but that's not working for smart playlists, becauses they are based on rules which means they are updated whenever a rule has been triggered.

I have a smart playlist which contains only 100 songs, with the rule to put only songs in this list which were not skipped within the last 3 months.

It would ne nonsense to copy the current songs into a normal playlist, as this smart playlist will change itself whenever I skip a song.

And it should be like that for almost every smart playlist.

Just checking in to mention I have the same problem. I have even tried to force updates to the playlists by deleting (so they disappeard from all devices, even my iPhone) and then re-creating them. But when the playlist re-appeared on my iPhone, it had all of the same songs it did before the deletion. Ugh. I was sure that would work as a brute force tactic.

Anyway, I submitted feedback here, which is a different place than previously suggested:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/icloud.html

This has a dropdown menu to select "iTunes in the cloud", so maybe it'll go to a different team of people.

I wonder if the problem is dependent of the way we are using our smart playlist?? Pretty fustrating!

This workaround of creating a dummy smart playlist works. Simply create a new smartplaylist that is empty. Set it to Playlist contains (the name of your smartplaylist). Set it to Live updating, limit to whatever number you wish, match only checked items as you normally would.

Then sync to your ipod

No matter what I did before, my smart playlists on my ipod continued to have items that I had deleted in my library and in my smart playlist. The smart playlist looked entirely differnt than the one on my ipod.

Yeah! Thank you tmksnyder.

Can't figure out how to give you points for solving the problem but you deserve those points.

Updating to iOS 5.1 fixed the issue for me.

Not for me. The precise issue that drives me crazy is that "Smart" Playlists in iTunes Match don't reccognize crtieria based on comments, and they don't recognize the constraints such as "Limit to X MB." So my playlist of "desert island" tracks, which are 5-star tracks with a cutoff of 100 songs based on most played songs, comes out on my iPad with all 542 5-star songs. Completely bogus, and still not fixed by Apple.

the "dummy" smart playlist worked for me on my iphone 4S with iOS 5.1 and the newest itunes. thank you!!

Yesterday I went to Apple store in Zurich, Wallisellen; they were not aware of such problems at all. They re-set my iPhone but that did not work either. I have iTunes 10.6 and iOS 5.1 on my 4S; the only thing I want from one single smart playlist is to have the latest tracks on top. It shows it on iTunes correctly but does the other way around on the device...the Apple guys offered me even a brand new iPhone but I very much doubt this is going to solve my issue, I can't imagine that other people do not have the same issue...😕

I get an error that says smart playlists that reference other playlists are not supported by iCloud, and will not be uploaded. :-(