Smart playlists are not in alphabetical order on iOS 5.1 devices

One of the most frustrating things for me about iTunes Match is the fact that the smart playlists in iTunes (version 10.6) do not sync in alphabetical order on my iPad/iPhone running iOS 5.1.

Even though I click on the Name column and the songs in iTunes appear in alphabetical order, the songs appear in a random order on the iPad. I spent hours trying to fix this by turning iTunes Match off on my iPad, turning it on etc all to no avail. I created new smart playlists thinking that maybe the original smart playlists were corrupted in some way by the upgrade to the latest version of iTunes. This did not work either.

Then, I had an idea. I created a new playlist (not a smart one), called it Test Alpha, copied the songs from the smart playlist into it and waited for my iPad to update.

Voila! The songs in this new, non-smart playlist are in alphabetical order.

I do hope that this problem is fixed. It is a pain to do this for the 15 odd smart playlist I have. Hope this helps someone else.