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

Yes, it makes sense. What doesn't make sense is when I came back and turned match on (this time only), all of my playlists finally synced and the download button appeared. It didn't do that before, despite my turning it off then on again several times and letting it do it's thing. It's a mystery to me...

Kevangogh's method is the only thing that worked for me INSTANTLY! All others didn't.

Go to page 4 of this thread and read his method.

jbgroup1 wrote:

I found a solutuion that appears to work (at least it did for all of my out of order playlists on the ipod touch). By adding the rule "Playlist--Is--Music" all of the smart playlists that have that rule are in the same order that they are in in itunes. I hope this solution works for everyone as it did for me.

This is the solution that worked for me. Thank you!

Am I missing something? Whenever I make a smart playlist with that rule ( "Playlist--Is--Music") I get:

"Smart playlists that reference other playlists are not supported by iCloud, and will not be uploaded."

Also, I recently moved to an iPhone 4S and set it up completely from scratch. Still having the same problem with smart playlists.

In reply to the original post: What worked for me was creating a new smart playlist with the exact same rules as the original iTunes default smart playlist (in my case Recently Added) with the added rule of Playlist>is>Music. My iPhone Recently Added list automatically synced correctly with itunes. Hope this helps.

Seems there could be multiple problems here being discussed. I found one problem for me was i had songs in the play list that were ineligable for icloud. Once I removed those songs the play list appeard and worked perfectly.

Thanks for the tip about switching it to number of songs instead of GB for a smart playlist. I just started using iTunes match a few days ago and my most listened to smart playlist was a complex one I created and had set to be a max of 3GB of songs. In iTunes it showed 110 songs. On my iPhone 5 it showed just 78 songs! I tried the other things suggested like duplicating and resyncing, etc, but that did not work. However, I changed the smart playlist in iTunes to be 250 songs max instead of 3GB max, then turned iTunes match on and off and all the songs showed up on the smart playlist on my iPhone, actually 111 songs showed up which is still concerning since there only 110 on the playlist in iTunes, but I can live with that rather than a 32 song shortage.

It is no wonder people cannot stand computers and tech. I have been using Macs since 2005, consider myself a power user, before that owned a PC since 1994 and even with nearly two decades of daily computer & tech usage, have to come to message boards and try arcane solutions to things that should as Apple claims, just work, but very rarely do.

I have discovered how to synch iTunes Playlists. Select Playlists on to your iPod. From the Synch page. Select Music--and then see the column for Playlists. Scroll down to check/uncheck the playlist you want and then apply and Synch and there you go. This was driving me nuts for a time.

Thanks very much; this worked for me! It seems that some smart playlists are just too smart for the iPod.

Adding the rule of Playlist>is>Music solves my problem of smart playlist iTunes not matching smart playlist on iPhone.

Thank you whoever originally discovered and posted this solution!

I don't know if this will help anyone but some of my smart playlists were working OK and others would not sync. One playlist showed 541 accounts in Itunes desktop but only 429 in itunes on my ipad. I tried everthing on this thread and others and nothing worked.

By accident, I noticed that if I starred one of the missing songs in itunes desktop it would then be added to the playlist on my ipad. I was able to get the two to match by selecting all songs, starring them and then removing the stars. Odd....

I have a fix (sort of)

Create a regular playlist and copy the songs from the smart playlist onto it and then sync the playlists to your iOs devices. You wont have the smart playlists themselves but you will have the content in the right order and the right songs grouped together.

I had a smart playlist for recently added items that was not syncing correctly. I believe the error was caused by the presence of Podcasts as well as Music in the list. My solution was to add the parameter ...

Hi there,

I did a complete shut down of my phone (held down the power button until I was prompted to swipe across the screen to turn the power off). When I turned the phone back on the sync worked properly.