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

jbgroup1's posting of adding a rule of "Playlist--is--Music" to the Smart Playlists seems to have fixed my ordering issues.

Thanks!

i have a version that worked for me, and is not messing up my itunes playlists:

i am syncing all of my music, and i just deleted all my playlists, synced my iphone, and then i took all my playlists back, with "cmd Z"! that actually worked for me, now i have all my playlists on my phone!

I've had this problem for a week and tried a deleting music, turning iTunes Match off/on: nothing worked.

FInally, I found a solution on the iPhone: Log Apple ID out of iTunes, power down phone, power on phone, log back in to iTunes--Match will turn on automatically and it worked normally (for me).

The reality is that all these solution may work temporarily but Apple must get their act together and acknowledge and fix iTunes...it has been an embarrasment to the company for quite some time and only seems to get worse. I'm not paying for a premium product for nothing. Apple, you must address this. I've been having slight issues or missing features (like sorting) since the iPhone's inception and I want to see progress. So far with the newest version of iTunes, I'm unimpressed. Steve Jobs moto was always "it just works" and iTunes is not exemplary of that.

I had many of the issues described in this thread - smart playlists weren't syncing and weren't limited properly on my iPhone 4S. (For example, I wanted to have 500MB of high-rated songs in a playlist so I could download them to my phone, but was presented with over 700 songs.)

Like many iTunes Match customers, I have a big library with lots of playlists and this was infuriating!

None of the combinations of off/on/resetting phone/computer/iTunes Match made a difference, except once when resetting Match deleted all the playlists from my phone. They came back the next time. (!!)

Eventually I found that limiting the smart playlists by *number of songs*, not by megabytes or gigabytes, meant they displayed correctly. Fingers crossed this remains the case!

Hope this helps somebody else too.

My issue is that songs in smart playlists that I've unchecked in iTunes are still showing up elsewhere. Anyone else run into this?

I'm having a different problem that seems to involve smart playlists only where iTunes plays a different song than the one I select.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4942708

I just spent over 90minutes on the phone with a senior advisor troubleshooting and we couldn't figure out any rhyme or reason to why certain songs play ok and others just immediately skip to a different song. The only common factor seemed to be smart playlists.

Has anyone else seen this behavior?

thanks....worked for my iphone as well....it seems that after a while itunes gets rusty and stuck.....so once in the while you gotta do this procedure to make it update itself......good job apple.....NOT!

I've only had this happen once, so if you have a repeat issue it may be caused by some particular configuration issue. Best of luck.

This worked perfectly for me. I was having problems with my smart playlists refusing to sync to my iphone at all, wired or wireless. I am running iTunes 11.0.2.26 on Windows 8 Pro with a brand new iPhone 5, Verizon.

Thanks jjbw. Limiting by "Items" worked. In this case, 200 Items selected at Random.

Limiting by 2 GB showed about 220 songs in iTunes 11.0.2 in Mountain Lion, but the same playlist in IOS 6.1.3 showed over 1,400 songs.

I finally solved this using a completely different method. Using 4S and MacBook Pro.

1) Go into iPhone "Music"

2) at the very bottom where there is a menu which says "Playlists/Artists/Songs/...."etc, choose "More"

3) Click on "Shared"

4) The default should be your "Library" and not "My iPhone".

Somehow "My iPhone" was checked. Once I switched it to "Library", it all worked again.

So I tried this, and the results were strange. When I switched to "Library" my smart playlists all matched up with the ones on my MBP, which was encouraging. However, all of the icloud download buttons disappeared from everywhere... songs, playlists, artists. So there was no indication of what was already on the phone or in the cloud. I tried quitting the music app on the phone and reopening it, and found that the download icons has returned and it had reset itself to "My iPhone". The smart playlist was back to being different than what it is on the MPB, (and songs were skipping again - not the main issue of this thread).

Yes, I took my iPhone out and tried to play some songs while I was away from my netword from the playlist and it wouldn't work. Then when I got home and was able to hook up to my wifi network, I could play them. Then I noticed Match was off, I don't remember turning it off. Regardless, once I turned it back on again, the playlists came back with the download button. Back in business...

I'm glad you're exploring the Music app, but please note that this function (the "Shared" item) isn't what you think it is. It's not a setting, nor does it have a default. This is a way to browse music on another device using Home Sharing. So, when you're home, you'll see an option for any iTunes copy open on a computer on your home network that you've signed into. Sometimes that might be "Library" or it might be called "Jim's Disco Tunes" if you've configured your iTunes that way.

In any case, since you're browsing the library on the computer, when you leave home (or wherever that computer is), your iPhone will no longer be able to reach that computer, and will switch back to browsing your on-iPhone music instead. This is also why the iCloud buttons disappear when you tap "Library" -- you're not looking at anything on your phone anyway, so whether they're on your phone from iCloud is irrelevant.

Does that make sense?

This article might help: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3819