- Apple - Support - Discussions - Smart Playlists broken on iTouch (some say it’s OS 3.1, others iTunes)
- Smart playlists broken on ipods in Itunes 9 - Mac Forums
Reading the various modern posts it sounds like there are multiple interacting bugs and that playlists that reference other playlists are broken as are podcasts in particular.
- In the Sync tab for Podcasts turn off “Automatically include” and check playlists in “include episodes from playlists”. (no effect)
- Recreate all smart playlists (not done)
- Don’t use playlists that reference other playlists (not applicable in this case)
- Hide playlists with date criteria inside a separate playlists that doesn’t have date criteria, sync the one without the date criteria (not applicable in this case)
- Uncheck live update in smart playlists that sync with iPhone. (this worked)
- iTunes 9- Smart Playlist not syncing as expected – Apple acknowledges that it’s messed up. The “copy to play order” is a new trick to try. There’s a bug with playlists that span media types (podcast and MP3)
- Problems with "last played" not being updated and smart playlists not being updated in 2006 - and even earlier.
- This Discussion post is telling: "...trying to synchronise Live Updating Smart Playlists with the Nano causes the Nano to freeze upon disconnection: http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10469096#10469096 ... The Smart Playlist thing is an old issue that we've seen with previous iPods. It's been broken/fixed/broken/fixed so many times now. I've spoke directly with Apple Level 2/3 about this back in 2006, and it does take a critical mass of people to report it before it's considered serious enough to be fixed: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=179445 ... However, be aware that Apple never considered Pod-board Live Updating to be a supported feature - legacy KB article 61686 - see the 179445 link for the wording - and, as I was told - if it was never officially present, it can't ever be officially broken (or fixed!)...
- On review of the long, long Discussion thread (Apple used to terminate these more aggressively) it's clear that Apple breaks Smart Playlists in many ways over many years. It's such a fabulous feature, but sometimes it seems like every Brain at Apple went to work on the iPhone. Maybe they just don't have anyone able to manage features this clever.
Facing the exact problem as many are describing here, but I found something that absolutely fixed this. All my Smart playlists worked great until I went to iTunes v9. I use a very sophisticated series of nested smart playlists .. only one playlist that I listen to on my iPod and so I was very annoyed when it no longer worked. Ironically, it's probably not actually a bug, but probably the result of Apple fixing a bug.
The common denominator was a single standard playlist that would prevent ANY smart playlist associated with it to not show up on my iPod or the sync list in iTunes. I copied the problem playlist, built a smart playlist pointing to it and went through and deleted one song at a time until the smart playlist magically appeared on the sync list for my iPod and the rotation and updates worked.
It turns out that one song was messing up EVERYTHING. When I right clicked and chose Info for the song, the one thing that was different was that somehow, under the options, it had been classified as a podcast instead of a song and the "Skip when Shuffling" box was checked. Switching the Media Kind back to Music from a Podcast fixed it but I would clear the skip check box,too. Changing that one song back to a song fixed ALL of my playlists that depended on that one base playlist...
Update 2/3/2010: iTunes 9.0.3 was supposed to fix some smart playlist bugs, but it didn't fix this one. To retain sort order I have to disable Live Updating. Still waiting for a fix.
Update 9/11/10: It's almost right with iPhone 4.1 and iTunes 10, but now some podcasts won't sync. This bug will be continued at that link ...