My smart playlists on my iPhone have no content when based on an element with blank (null) values

Anyone having problems with these smart playlists please go to http://www.apple.com/feedback and submit the bug to Apple. I have talked with their support regarding these bugs and they have told me that Apple recognizes it as a bug, but they have no timeline for a fix because they have not had enough feedback or bugs reported regarding it so they assume no one cares. We need everyone to submit their feedback so that this can be fixed sooner rather than never. Thanks.

I'm having a very similar problem. I have a zero stars playlist, and on the iPhone is just shows songs that are purchased and in the cloud, available for download. Nothing whatsoever to do with the actual smart playlist. The songs in the smart playlist are all on my phone, though, and I can navigate to them from the artists or album buttons.

Here is what someone else suggested as a workaround

I had a similar problem, where my smart playlists including songs with <rating - is - unrated> were not including any of those 0 star songs on the iPad & iPhone. All playlists were working on iTunes on my PC. After reading the forum and much fiddling, it seems like I was having 2 problems coinciding:

1. Certain smart playlists on iOS are broken - for me the ones including the criteria of unrated songs.
2. iOS wasn't recognising unrated songs (i.e. the songs seemed to have a rating of "N/A" rather than a rating of 0)

I have solved the problem by:

1. Creating a non-smart playlist, included all the unrated songs on it.
2. Highlighted them all, gave them a rating (anything is fine).
3. Synced to record the new rating on iDevices (you should do this for all devices now, or it won't fix problem 2 above on the unsynced devices).
4. Removed rating from same songs.
5. Sync again.
6. Create a new smart playlist for unrated songs.
7. Deleted the old smart playlist - any linked playlist will show up with a ⚠ next to them in iTunes. You have to relink those playlists to the new smart playlist.
8. Sync again

My problem included multiple playlists where one the criteria was <rating - is - unrated>. I didn't want to recreate all of those playlists, so i changed the <rating - is - unrated> to refer to the new smart playlist i.e. <playlist - is - unrated>.

Hope this might help someone else.

Thanks to this thread I just submitted feedback for the broken "Live updating", hope to see a fix for that in iOS soon!

I tried this workaround, and suprisingly it worked for me. However, it does seem to be a pure workaround and not a permanent solution by any means. I haven't test this yet, but it seems to me that this will not help new songs from working correctly, or if a song is removed from the iOS device at some point, does it still remember how to rate that song as 0 rated, probably not. So, it at least gets smart playlists working to an extent again, but this is definitely something that needs a permanent fix from Apple on either the iTunes side or the iOS side.

I was actually able to still use my old playlists without having to re-create them as the original poster stated. So you can try the workaround without creating new playlists, it worked for me.

Again i will reiterate, if anyone has not submitted their bug to http://www.apple.com/feedback, please do so in order to ensure these bugs are visible to Apple and hopefully they will be fixed. Thanks.

I tried to do a work around for this problem going to the genres tab and for every genre and rating the entire genre one star. This rates every song in that genre. Then going smart playlist and instead of using a zero star rating use a 1 star rating. I still did not work... still no content on the iPhone. I did however get album cover art for the list. Apple please fix your broken azz app.