iOS 4 Smart Playlist Bug

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sallenmd

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I'm seeing a strange bug with my Smart Playlists on my 64GB 3rd Gen iPod Touch since upgrading to iOS 4. I use dozens of Smart Playlists, so I was very excited that they will finally appear in the folders I use to organize them in iTunes. For example, I have a folder of artist favorite lists.

The lists have criteria like this: Artist is Aerosmith + My Rating is greater than 2. With Live Update enabled, the playlists are empty or only have a few of the songs in them. With Live Update disabled, all of the songs appear in the lists. When I look at the lists on the iPod from iTunes, the songs are all in the lists. The songs are all on the iPod and can be seen in and played from the Songs, Artists and Albums tabs. They only do not appear in the Smart Playlists.

I've tested this by creating two Smart Playlists with the only difference between them being Live Update enabled versus not enabled. Viewed on the iPod the one with Live Update enabled contains no songs, but the other has all ten songs that meet the criteria. Viewed from within iTunes while docked, all ten songs appear in both playlists. Weird!

Anyone else seen this? Any ideas?
 

mapipolo

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Same problem here... fixed (for me at least)

YES. This bug appeared the day I upgraded to iOS 4, and needless to say I was not happy about it. I assumed that restoring the iPod would probably fix it, so I finally did that this morning (without backup... a full erase and rebuilding). It did not work. So, I went Googling and found your post at the top of results.

Since the restore didn't work, I decided to try some other stuff. Like you, I use playlists named after my favorite artists inside a "best of" folder to keep some of their highlights on my iPod at all times. For example, I had a "Massive Attack" playlist inside the "Best of Artists" folder with these criteria:

Artist is Massive Attack
Rating is greater than 4
Comments does not contain "duplicate"

Now, I have pretty much the entire Massive Attack discography, but only three seemingly randomly selected songs were making it into the playlist on the iPod (in iTunes, it was correct... lots of material from all of their albums).

I add that "comments" criterion to my smart playlists just to avoid having duplicate songs from compilation albums and such taking up space on my iPod: I just write "duplicate" in the comments for any version I don't want, and that takes care of that.

This is the problem. Apparently, iOS 4 introduced a bug whereby any smart playlist criterion involving the "Comments" field wreaks major havoc. I took that out of all my artists and composers smartlists, and voila... they were ALL populated correctly. (There were many playlists with this problem, and not only artists... classical composers too.)

Just to see if the problem persisted generally with any "Comments" rule, I created a new playlist with this criteria:

Artist is Massive Attack
Rating is greater than 4
Comments does not contain "blablablablabla"

Of course, as I have nothing with that comment in my library, it obviously should make no difference, and in iTunes it did not. But — like clockwork — the playlist was no longer populated correctly on the iPod. BIG bug, Apple.

I don't know if that helps you, but I thought I'd mention it. It's a very annoying bug, but at least I found a workaround. I just use "match only checked items" now, and uncheck the duplicates.
 

rockmyplimsoul

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Strange, my 2nd gen Touch with iOS 4 doesn't have either of these problems and I use Rating and Comments criteria extensively. Maybe try adding "Playlist is Music" to your criteria?
 

mapipolo

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Strange, my 2nd gen Touch with iOS 4 doesn't have either of these problems and I use Rating and Comments criteria extensively. Maybe try adding "Playlist is Music" to your criteria?
Weird, weird eccentricities, my good man! ;) This also solves the problem... even if I reinstate the "Comments" rule.

(For the record, I'm also using a 2nd gen touch - 16 GB)
 
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jasoncordelle

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Maybe iOS4 is "smarter" than we want it to be? It's looking for what's not there, or needs to be told it's music it's looking for?
 
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