3G ipod with non-updating "smart" playlists

It appears that apple managed to disable one of the most widely used features of the ipod with an update last year. Lots of folks have reported that the January firmware update fixed it... but it doesn't contain any new software for 3G (touchwheel) ipods.
Anyone have advice on how to get smart playlists to work on a 3G ipod?

I was searching this forum and found someone who says that 4th gen ipods have problems live updating smart playlists if the criteria "last skipped" is on the playlist. I took this off of all of my playlists but they still don't work. Then I tried making a playlist that is just "rating is equal to 5 stars" and it WORKS!!! But that doesn't help me out much for my other playlists so maybe it's some other criteria that's causing the problem. Any ideas?

Similar Messages

Please help! Ipod not dynamically updating smart playlists!

I have quite a complex system of smart playlists on my 4G color ipod but I can't get any of them to update dynamically away from the computer. I have a total of 6 and here are their preferences:
SPL 1:
match ALL
1) My rating is in the range 4-5 stars
2) Last played is not in the last 1 day
3) Last skipped is not in the last 1 day
4) Playcount is less than 5
limit to 100 by most recently added
SPL 2:
match ALL
1) My rating is in the range 0-3 stars
2) Last played is not in the last 1 day
3) Last skipped is not in the last 1 day
4) Playcount is less than 4
limit to 55 songs by most recently added
SPL 3:
match ALL
1) My rating is in the range 3-5 stars
2) Last played is not in the last 1 day
3) Last skipped is not in the last 1 day
4) Playcount is greater than 5
limit to 30 songs by random
SPL 4:
match ALL
1) Last played is not in the last 1 day
2, 3, 4) Playlist is not SPL 1, SPL 2, or SPL 3
limit to 15 songs by random
Unwanted:
match ANY
1) Time is greater than 15 minutes
2) Genre is Comedy
The active playlist that I use to listen to:
match ANY
1-4) Playlist is SPL 1, SPL 2, SPL 3, or SPL 4
5) Playlist is not Unwanted
So here's the problem. When I sync with my computer, the playlists work great, everything updates as expected and I get a pretty diverse playlist every time I sync which I want. The problem is that while I'm listening to my music on the ipod away from the computer, my playlists don't dynamically update. After I listen to a song, the song's supposed to remove itself from the playlist which doesn't happen, as well as when I skip songs. Even when I rate songs that aren't rated they don't appear in any playlist. This is really frustrating and I can't find a solution anywhere and yes, I do have Live Updating selected. I also have "Match only checked items" selected on all playlists as well. If anyone has any ideas for how to fix this, I would love to know. Thanks!

I was searching this forum and found someone who says that 4th gen ipods have problems live updating smart playlists if the criteria "last skipped" is on the playlist. I took this off of all of my playlists but they still don't work. Then I tried making a playlist that is just "rating is equal to 5 stars" and it WORKS!!! But that doesn't help me out much for my other playlists so maybe it's some other criteria that's causing the problem. Any ideas?

IPod no longer updates smart playlists after upgrade to 1.3

After upgrading my 5th Gen 30GB iPod to 1.3 I noticed immediately that the smart playlists on my iPod aren't updating any longer. Until 3 days ago my iPod had firmware version 1.2.1 and all smart playlists worked as expected.
I have many smart playlists that I have been happily using everyday for the past 2 years to play only new podcasts, shuffle my favorite tunes based on when they have been played last, and move songs in and out of My Top rated tunes based on their ratings. These no longer work on my iPod, but when I sync with iTunes they update fine. I didn't make any changes to my smart playlists before or immediately after upgrading, at least until I noticed the problem.
For the last couple of days since upgrading I have tried deleting all my smart playlists and recreating them, that didn't help. I have also tried restoring my iPod, which also didn't help. I have also tried creating a very basic smart playlist i.e.
Match all of the following rules - checked
Rating is ***
Live updating - checked
Sync'd that to my iPod and started playing a tune and changed it's rating to 5 stars. I then entered a static playlist, played a song from that and when it was done entered the new 5 star rating smart playlist and it wasn't updated.
I'm don't know what else to try, I've repeated the same test as above on my wife's 2nd Gen nano and it worked as expected. Has anyone else noticed smart playlists failing to update since the upgrade? I have searched here and on google, but only found reference to much older firmwares.

I'm having the same problem, once I've listened to a song in my 0 plays list, go out to a new menu, then back in, all the songs that have been played are still there, when a few weeks ago they were taken off and only unplayed songs were still there. Now if I switch to another playlist and back, I have to scroll all the way back to the point I was when I changed which didn't happen earlier.

IPod won't update smart playlist

Last week, I had a smart play list set: limit to nine songs, playing only unrated songs. It would go thru 9 songs and then stop and go back to the music menu choice. If I selected the playlist again, 9 new songs would be in the list. Now, I have to plug it into my computer to get a refreshed list. An idea how I can get my old functionality back? Thanx.
dell Windows XP

I find that if I pause playback and exit all the way to the main menu, the smart playlist is refreshed when I go back into it.
I have several smart playlists on my iPod and they are all able to immediately update using this method.

Live Updating Smart Playlist... but not live updating iPod?

I have several video files that I want to convert to iPod-compatible MP4. I have a program to do the conversion in a batch mode and then add the files to my iTunes library.
I also have a live-updating Smart Playlist (for all files where the Kind includes 'video' and the playcount is 0) to catch these files as they come in. I have this playlist as one of the ones set to be automatically updated on my iPod.
However, in my test runs, the video is properly converted and added to my iTunes library, and the Smart Playlist picks it up as well. However, it does not then send the file to my iPod (which is already in its dock) unless I first eject the iPod and reconnect it.
I'd really like to get this working, as I'm hoping to do this on a somewhat regular basis--have a selection of stuff queued up when I go to bed, and then have it waiting for me on my iPod when I wake up to go to the gym. It worked for me over the weekend, when I bought an episode of Knight Rider from the music store while the iPod was connected--it was downloaded and added to the playlist, and then copied to the iPod with no intervention from me. Unless my memory is faulty or something.

Welcome to the Discussions Steavis,
As far as I know, a sync to the iPod only occurs upon the first attachment, as long as your settings are set for such action.
The iPod will only sync after the initial attachment if you initiate the sync yourself. I believe it is in a pull-down menu, and/or CTRL-Click the iPod in the source list and select "Sync".
I am not sure if that is all correct, but in my experience, if I have connected my iPod, it syncs, then I say load in a CD to iTunes, I must re-sync the iPod before they transfer.
Not knowing what you are using for this automation to get the app that converts and adds, etc, can do, I might explore a script that runs at a specific time of day and initiates a sync to any iPod connected. That should be fairly easy to do.
Beavis2084

Do Auto-Updating Smart Playlists really work?

I followed the old thread about auto-updating smart playlists not updating automatically on the iPod. Apparently the 2006-1-10 update fixes it, but some smart playlists still aren't updating for me. The simple rating-based playlists work (they update), but more complex smart playlists such as this don't work:
Match All Following Rules:
Podcast is true
Playcount is 0
Time is less than 11:00
Kind contains audio
According to this support document: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301910 smart playlists should update based on any criteria, but I'm not seeing that. Am I doing something wrong? What types of smart playlists have people gotten to work?
Thanks.

I've posted a better version of this thread in the "Using the iPod with color display" forum.
APPLE DISCUSSION ADMINS: Please delete this thread. Thanks!

Tip for creating auto-updating Smart Playlists for iPod

Short Answer:
Don't use Smart Playlists that use rules with nested playlists which aren't completely on iPod.
Long Answer:
If you're like me and use nested Smart Playlists, make sure that any Smart Playlist you want to have auto-update on the iPod doesn't use a rule which uses as a criteria a playlist that isn't fully present on iPod (exclamation point next to the Smart Playlist in iTunes when connecting iPod to your Mac).
For example, I have Smart Playlists to exclude certain tracks in other Smart Playlists (Streams, Spoken Word,tracks under 1 minute, etc.). These are tracks that I usually want to exclude in other Smart Playlists but don't want to add those rules each and every time.
The problem is that iPod looks to see if that 'excludes' playlist is present, which obviously it isn't because by it's nature it's designed to exclude tracks. If a nested playlist isn't present it seems the auto-update will not work.
My solution was to create a new Smart Playlist specifically for the iPod, which contained all the rules of my "master exclude" Smart Playlist and any other I wanted specifically for the iPod.
My beef with Apple here is that I can't duplicate a Smart Playlist, which is possible in iPhoto. Being able to do that would make things much easier.
I have since gone about creating 'excludes' playlists so that the playlist itself excludes tracks; previously I was creating a Smart PLaylist that contained (included) all the tracks I wanted to exclude, then using that as a rule (Playlist is not 'Excludes') in other playlists. The second method worked fine on iTunes, since all the tracks are present, but it creates problems on iPod.

I've posted a better version of this thread in the "Using the iPod with color display" forum.
APPLE DISCUSSION ADMINS: Please delete this thread. Thanks!

When i sync my ipod why doesnt my smart playlists update its settings (ie recently played list does not reflect songs only played in 2012)

i set up a smart playlist for my ipod touch i only want songs that i've played in 2012 show up in that playlist. but when i sync it on my ipod it still has other songs in it. i tried deleting the list and all but it still comes back. i copy to play order and it doesnt work as well. help. thanks

Bump
I changed the rules: Set mediatype to only music
Limit is 25, recently played songs first
Live update is enabled
Still the same problem. PLEASE help

Manually and quickly updating smart playlists with 'Live Updating' off?

Hi,
I have a quite large music library (13,000 songs) and use a multitude of nested smart playlists that change often because I don't want to listen to the same song every day and I want to listen to good songs more often than bad songs. I'm also splitting up by genre, because not all my friends appreciate all of my musical tastes, and I myself am not always in the mood for every genre.
The consequence of this is that from time to time, iTunes stutters when playing a new song, presumably because it's updating all the smart playlists when the previous song ended.
Now, I had hoped that turning 'Live Updating' off would cause iTunes to update the smart playlists at startup instead of updating continuously. However, it turns out that though the performance improved dramatically, turning off 'Live Updating' caused the smart playlists to never update. Obviously I don't want that, since that means all my smart playlists are static.
Is there a way to have both good performance and easy updating of the playlists? There are a bit too many playlists to manually update very day by forcing iTunes to update the playlist.
An 'Update all smart playlists now' button or a 'Update all smart playlists at startup' feature would be nice...
Any hints, tips, help, suggestions?
Thank you so much.
Greetings,
Tijl Kindt
Athlon64 3800+ 2GB RAM Windows XP iPod Nano 4GB Black

Using the SDK, you (well, I) would do something like this:
1. Get a list of all the playlists in the iTunes Library.
2. For each playlist, test if playlist is a Smart playlist (Playlist->Smart() returns a boolean)
2a. If it is a smart playlist, select it by setting a property value for the BrowserWindow object (basically BrowserWindow->SelectedPlaylist(playlist object)) (for example perl code, see http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.perl.misc/browse_thread/thread/1248563d 743795d8/be1a88fc6eeab0e4?lnk=gst&q=itunesperlselectedplaylist&rnum=1#be1a88fc6eeab0e4)
2b. Using keystrokes (Alt-F,G), select "File..Get Info". Then keystroke Alt-U to toggle live updating, then Enter to click OK.
2c. Repeat above, which should toggle live updating off again. (unfortunately there is no way to be sure whether the starting state was off or on -- I'm assuming it will always be off)

Why don't non simplistic smart playlists work with my iTouch?

I like listening to my podcasts in the order they were released.
So I have a smart playlist that say:
genre=podcast
ignore these podcasts
include only podcasts played < 1
This smart playlist appears in the sync list but does not sync with my iTouch (2nd gen i think).
Other smart playlists like
rating >= *
do sync.
I thought this worked with my 2nd generation classic.
What gives?

Good questions, looks like the limiting number is just broken on iOS devices. For the second, you'd have to try it out. Do they update as songs are played? And if they update do they download the new songs automatically or just put the "cloud" listing in the list?

Non-Live Smart Playlists harder to update in iTunes 8

Hi,
I have a smart playlist which shows me songs I have listened to a certain number of times, but which I have not yet rated. I have "Live Updating" disabled on this playlist, as I want to be able to rate songs as I play them without them dynamically disappearing from the playlist when I rate them.
Periodically, I used to update the playlist by opening the "Edit Smart Playlist" window, and then just selecting "OK".
Since iTunes 8 however, it seems that I have to turn on "Live Updating", and then turn it off again (a task which takes 6 steps {Edit, Turn On Live updating, OK, Edit, Turn Off Live Updating, OK} instead of the previous 2 {Edit, OK}).
Does anyone know if this was deliberate, or know the reasoning behind this change?
Many thanks,
bigmealy
Message was edited by: bigmealy

I want to use Smart Playlists to backup my non-smart playlists so if I accidently delete my playlist, a copy will be preserved in the corresponding shadow Smart Playlist, but the results are disappointing. The Smart Playlist has just one line: "Playlist is <name of playlist>" and I initially turn on Live Updating to make a copy of the playlist that I want to backup. I exit the Smart Playlist, then go back in and turn-off Live Updating. The Smart Playlist should then preserve a copy of the playlist that I want protected. So, I can add or delete from the regular playlist or even delete the playlist and the mirrored copy in Smart Playlist won't be effected because Live Updating isn't turned on. This works as expected until sometime in the near future (maybe a day later) when the Smart Playlist will inexplicably become a mirror of the playlist even though Live Updating is off!! It doesn't occur when iTunes is exited and restarted and because the playlists are apparently included in the iTunes library database, I can't see a date-time stamp to see when Smart Playlist was last written to as a clue to when it got changed. This is most definitely a bug.

How do you update smart playlists with live update turned off?

If I create a smart playlist in itunes and deselect live updating then how exactly does the smart playlist load up?
The reason I ask is that started setting up Smart Playlists for all of the artists on my computer and they're all set to live update which is consequently slowing down my itunes. I realize that I may not necessarily need that. My question is though...how exactly would I go about manually updating a smart playlist that has live updating turned off?

Well, the problem is that I have smart playlists for every artist in my library (which is literally hundreds). With every live update turned on, every time I edit tags for a new single or something it'll scan all the smart playlists for matches. The reason I'd like to have smart playlists instead of regular playlists is that I tend to add a lot of singles, and, especially in the hip hop genre, they tend to have a lot of guest appearances so I'd like the smart playlists to do tehir job.....I'd just prefer to not have it set to live update so I can avoid delays during tagging.
Apparently this is a known side efffect of having many smart playlists in your itunes. I realize my way of working with them might be slightly unconventional in comparison to how they are typically used but it's great for me. If I could leave live update on without any performance degregation then I would but it seems I have to pick.
I read somewhere that if you shut down itunes and restart that it'll refresh all your smart playlists (if live update is turned off).

Live updating smart playlists not actually updating

Apparently, this was a common complaint back in 2007. Well, I am still having this problem.
iPhone 4, iOS 4.3.3
I have a static playlist filled with music called "MUSIC". I have a smart playlist "DYNAMIC" that references "MUSIC", which filters only songs rated 3-5, and not played in the past week. These playlists are just used as a source.
I then have a smart playlist for each genre (e.g. "RAP", "ROCK"), which reference "DYNAMIC", and simply filter the appropriate genre.
All of these smart playlists have "live updating" enabled. They all work as expected in iTunes. They all work as expected on an 5.5G iPod.
However, on the iPhone, when I completely play a song in "RAP", the song is not immediately removed. I expected this, since this is the same behavior on my 5.5G iPod. However, on the iPod, I would simply exit the playlist, then re-enter, and the playlist would be regenerated, removing the played song. This does not work on the iPhone. No matter what I do, the played song is still shown, despite the fact that the DYNAMIC smart playlist should remove the song.
I also tested by playing the song directly from DYNAMIC, and it still does not update. I created a new, basic smart playlist which does nothing but reference the static playlist "MUSIC" and filter out songs played in the past day. It still does not update.
I will note that none of my smart playlists reference a playlist that is not synced on the iPhone. I know that a smart playlist referencing a non-synced playlist can turn the smart playlists static. I doubled checked that this is not the case here.
I will also note that I verified the songs are being marked as played via iTunes.
Hjalp!

Annoyed,
You might find our little Discussion of this whole Smart Playlist issue:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=1514307#1514307
interesting.
In particular, Smart Playlists containing Podcasts have yet to have their functionality restored as I have been discussing with Level 2 Support:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=1683550
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1536677#1536677
Kind regards,
Gopha.

Need to Create a Live Update Smart Playlist That Shuts Off After a While

Hi All--
I'm trying to create a smart playlist with the following properties:
1) Every time I play it, it selects a different random set of songs.
2) The playlist plays for a fixed duration, then shuts off. (I like to go to sleep to music, but it wakes me up in the middle of the night if it plays for too long.)
The best I've been able to come up with is to set "not played in the last xx days", "Limit to yy minutes selected by random", and "live updating". However, there's a problem with this: as soon as one song has played, it's purged from the list, which causes live updating to replace it with a new song. As a result, this creates a list that plays forever, since new songs are continuously added to replace the ones that have been played.
I tried turning off live updating, but then I'm stuck with the same songs over and over. I also know about the trick of just using "select random" and deleting the contents of the list, so that live update will repopulate it, but that won't work on an iPod without doing it in iTunes and then re-syncing.
Any ideas?

OK, I think I finally found a way to do this, sorta. This will work on any iPod or iPhone that supports live update and allows the creation of ad-hoc playlists, either named or on-the-go:
1) Create the list as described above.
2) Sync to iPod or iPhone
3a) On a non-touch iPod, highlight the playlist and hold down the select button until you get the menu with "add to on-the-go" in it, and select that.
3b) On an iPod touch or iPhone, create a new playlist, then select the dynamic list and "add all songs" to it.
The playlist you created isn't dynamic, so you'll just play through it once and stop. Deleting the contents from the temporary list and doing step 3a/b over will get you a new set of songs. The dynamic list will purge the songs and update with new ones as you play them from the static list.
It's not perfect, but it's reasonably fast to get a time-bounded selection of music that refreshes each time you want to play the list.

Problem with ratings-based smart playlists in iOS5.

I use ratings-based smart playlists to organize my music. For example, a typical smart playlist will include all songs from a given genre rated 3 stars or better. Playlists work perfectly on PC/iTunes and iPad (and used to work perfectly on iPhone/iPod before iOS5), but on iPhone 4S (iOS5) and iPod touch (iOS5), only the lowest-rated songs show up; higher rated songs omitted from the smart playlist. However, I also always have a playlist that has the higher ratings. So the songs are on the iPhone/iPod, but just not in all the correct playlists. Anyone have help for me? Thanks.

I'm having the same problem-- my "Smart Playlists" don't seem to update. I created a new smart playlist with a single artist, and nothing comes into it-- so if I make one just for artist=devo, for example, no tracks come through despite their being hundreds.
I also employ smart playlists on my podcasts-- so when plays=1, it disappears from the list. These are not updating, despite my making no changes to them other than upgrading to iTunes 10.
My "recently played" list DOES seem to be updating, and I don't understand why I'm seeing this despite making no changes.

3G ipod with non-updating "smart" playlists

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for