songs in Smart Playlist don't copy to iOS 10 device

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Level 1

19 points

songs in Smart Playlist don't copy to iOS 10 device

I upgraded iTunes to 12.5.1.21 on my Mac Mini on Tuesday, and updated my iPhone 6 and iPad Air to iOS 10. I also have an iPod Touch 5 that is stuck at iOS 9, which turns out to be a blessing. In iTunes I have a large number of Smart Playlists, many of which rotate content to least-recently played, or have date filters to filter out songs that have been played in the last week, for instance. So when I play songs in the list, then update the list in iTunes, the played songs are taken off, and new songs come in. All that works well.

Until I update my iOS 10 devices. When I update the playlist in iTunes on the Mac, it shows the new content. When I update my iDevice, it shows the updated songs on the device, using the view from iTunes on the Mac. When I undock the device and check the playlist, there are no songs. All the songs in the playlist are gone. Either the songs are actually there, but the device's iTunes has lost them, or they were never really copied.

This does not carry over to other types of playlists. It seems to affect only Smart Playlists with date restrictions. My iPod Touch still behaves fine with the same Smart Playlists. So perhaps not a problem with iTunes on the Mac, but iTunes in iOS 10.

iPhone 6, iOS 10

Posted on Sep 15, 2016 8:47 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

SGiandomenico

Level 1

18 points

Sep 16, 2016 8:47 PM in response to KelDez

I have also found that smart playlists that depend on other playlists (i.e. they include a "Playlist is ..." rule) are similarly broken and show up empty in iOS 10 (but they are okay in iTunes on Mac (for now)). This holds whether the sourced playlist is also a smart playlist, or just a regular manual playlist.

However, I followed the advice in this article, and that fixed it for me: http://www.techradar.com/how-to/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/ios-10-pr oblems-here-s-how-to-fix-the-most-common…

In short, unsync any of the broken playlists (i.e. take them off your phone), and then add them back in. It took a little big of juggling for me to figure out how to unsync all my playlists without it also removing the associated music (mostly because I did not want to wait for it to recopy my entire library over), but after I did, my playlists all started working for me again.

Maybe it will help with the date rules as well?

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Answer 2

KelDez Author

Level 1

19 points

Sep 17, 2016 5:35 PM in response to SGiandomenico

This did solve the problem. I didn't mind the time to copy all my songs back to the iPhone, so I turned off Sync Music entirely. Applied the update to my phone and undocked it. No Playlists were left, but it still showed my entire library in the Song list. Songs that weren't on the phone had the download icon, and there were still a lot of songs that were still on the phone. Something goofy is going on. So I turned Sync Music back on, and hit Sync. I got an error, there was too much stuff (about 6GB) trying to be synced to the phone that wouldn't fit. So I turned off several of the playlists. Still too much. I turned off ALL the playlists. Still won't fit. ***?? So I look around. Apparently a number of Genres and Albums had gotten turned on, which copied all songs in those genres to the phone. Now, my memory isn't great, but I don't remember turning on all those Genres, and especially not the Albums. There were albums turned on that I didn't even like all that much. So I turned them all off. Now I have many GB free on the phone! I turned back on some of the Playlists, and checked the phone, and the songs are listed now. So it may have been an install goof, it may have been an iTunes for iOS goof. Part of it may have been an operator goof, but I'm not taking all the blame.

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Answer 3

Sep 17, 2016 6:17 PM in response to KelDez

The nature of this fix (basically, reinstall your whole library!) would suggest that this was clearly a software bug, and not user error. And it took quite a bit of digging for me to find this solution. Annoying.

Glad to hear it worked for you though! Here's hoping it was a one-time-only kind of thing!

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Answer 4

Zatixo

Level 1

8 points

Sep 23, 2016 2:33 PM in response to KelDez

Every update of iOS break the music app a bit more.....

it's the reason I asked Apple to pay back the 3 months I paid (it worked, so it means they are aware of their sin of ignoring bugs) and use Spotify instead. Apparently a lot of people did the same since the release of Apple Music boosted Spotify subscriptions...

Apple is just an *** to ignore bugs.

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Answer 5

rickieee

Level 1

4 points

Sep 30, 2016 2:13 PM in response to SGiandomenico

This did not solve my problem. Posted details here: Re: Playlist from iTunes syncs to iPhone, but not all songs show up

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