Smart Playlists with Date Criteria

So I went through technical support because I had this exactly some problem. Smart playlist shows up in iTunes on my iMAC, as well as via Apple TV (both via iCloud and Home Sharing options.) It also fully populates those smart playlists.

For my pre-existing Smart Playlists (that only have criteria for the GROUPING field) show up, have songs, but are quite a few songs short. I then created a brand new play list with brand new tracks... and its empty on iPhone 4S and iPAD2. Apple TV and IMAC are fine.

So technical support provided me with this response: For smart playlists to work on iOS devices, the songs must be downloaded to the device.

My feedback was this: So this is chicken and the egg. You create the playlist to easily locate and download those songs to your device, but you cant because they have to be on your device before they will show in the playlist.

I suppose the only work around is to create the smart playlist w/ your filters. THEN create a regular playlist and copy everything in the SMART Playlist into the regular playlist.

I have not used Apple products for very long... approaching 2 years. I moved everything to Apple. Computers, laptops, portable devices, etc... I have been VERY impressed. HOWEVER, this makes the point of Smart Playlists completely manual when it comes to your iOS device.

I will for sure be launching a compliant to www.apple.com/feedback.

Actually, that answer from technical support isn't even entirely correct, either. A lot of the Smart Playlists just don't work on mobile devices through iTunes Match any more at all. For instance, any playlists that use time-criteria. Or playlists that are based on play count. Or playlists that reference other playlists (although that's an admitted problem with iTunes Match in the first place).

And yes, unaddressed issues of this magnitude pretty much make iTunes Match a failure to those of us who have large music collections. GMusic has the same capacity, and is free. The only "advantage" iTunes Match had was compatibility with my smart playlists.

As always, submit feedback early and often.

Many of us use smart playlists and are disappointed with iTMatch. Be sure to leave feedback on Apple's feedback page!

Hey, i've found a solution for this:

I used to have Date criterias like "played within the last 2 weeks" or similar (i don't know how it is named in the english version of itunes, since i used it in german language, but i hope you will find the correspondig criteria).

I have changed the "relative" date condition to an "absolute" date.. for example "played after 2011/12/12".

If you do it that way, it should work fine... tested with iPhone 4 iOS 5.01.

By the way: you can duplicate your original smart playlist for testing..

yes.. i have the same problem. Apple you are really starting to lag behind in your core technology. lots of things arent working anymore!