Anyone else tested this out? My nested smart playlists are live updating on my iPod Touch 3rd generation and my compilations are also collapsed into one album artist just like in iTunes. Took long enough, but nice to see it fixed.
Testing it out now having seen this post, hadn't even thought to look at smartlist updating since I saw no mention of it from the extensive beta period, nor did it occur to me that it might even be a possibility after well over two years of bupkiss...
While I'm waiting on some music to play, one confirmed change is playlists no longer have their sorting affected by special characters at the beginning of their name, DOH, there goes that way to keep playlists organized in some way other than alphabetical.
OK, some test results: Made a very simple test case using a source non-smart list with 10 songs and a smartlist that pulled 5 songs at random from that source list with the rotation condition of not being played in the last day. While the list was playing got the odd but at least semi-promising behavior that just played songs rotated to the bottom of the smart playlist. And when all 5 had played...
(I'll edit this post as soon as I have an answer, going to go walk the dog and find out)
EDIT: Nope, while smartlists are indeed technically updating under iOS 5, they are not, unfortunately, updating
correctly. The rotation of the played songs to the bottom of the queue that was going on mid-play was as far as the updating went. After all 5 songs played, I wound up with the exact same 5 songs in the original order.
So, while smartlists may update
more under iOS 5 than 4, the critical ability to reference another list doesn't work, nor does last played (at least in conjunction with referencing another list). Without those two rules working, there's no functional difference.
There is a consolation prize to make up for this bad news: Playlist folders within folders actually IS supported under iOS 5. No idea how many levels deep you can go, but they will actually go at least to a list inside a folder inside another folder (what I tested).