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

jbgroup1's solution to add additional rule to smart playlist "is=music" helped me.

I have iPod touch 3rd gen and itunes on Windows. I have never updated itunes, flashed ipod, I don't use itunes match, etc. I use ipod only as a dumb data carrier for my car stereo. Anyway, at some point it stopped syncing the playlists. It synced songs and the playlist names, but all smart playlists became empty. The additional rule on smart playlist fixed it.

After a lot of frustration with trying to fix this issue, I just recreated new smart playlists and synced these to my phone and it worked perfectly fine.

I have been using an iTunes back up that I started about 7 years ago. I believe that these smart playlists saved from from an older itunes are in different format. I don't believe this format syncs perfectly to the new iOS. I could be wrong about why, but creating new smart playlists seemed to fix my issue.

To create new smart playlists:

You can look at the parameters of your old playlist to recreate new ones, then delete the old ones and sync your iphone! Make sure you name them something different like 'Recently Added (NEW)' so you can know which playlist to detele. Once it syncs correctly, you can chance the name to whatever you like 🙂

Hope this works for other people as well!

Make sure that every song that's in the Smart Playlist has a genre assigned to it. Songs without an unknown genre won't sync over to devices in Smart Playlists.

Five years later, this bug is still extant -- and this solution STILL works!