Live Updating Smart Playlists Not Live Updating (Playcount)

[Dembo]

Hi all,

I have a smart playlist which is showing me my favorite podcasts with a playcount of zero. I expected it to become shorter when I listen (all the way to the end) through it, however, won't happen - no podcasts are dropped after being played.

Just in case: 16GB, 2.0.1 latest iTunes OSX 10.5.4.

Cheers,
Dembo

 

[gray67]

I cannot find the thread where this bug is mentioned but from my recollection of the thread it seems this has been a bug in iPhone for some time now.

The basic problem seems to be that the iPhone does not update the local database used by iTunes to track things like last played, play count, etc. I do something similar to your approach to go through unplayed songs in my library. What I finally figured out is that many of the songs I thought were played all the way through (removing itself from my main playlist) were not being updated as played. However, I cannot reproduce consistently the conditions that cause a song to actually update vs. not, so I can't create an error report. I suspect that this is one possible reason that Apple has not tracked down this bug.

 

[Dembo]

Thanks for the suggestion, however, the annoying thing in my case is that as soon as I sync to iTunes playcounts etc. are updated and the "live updating" playlist is cut down to the expected length.

Strange.

Even more confusing: The same live updating playlists work just fine (i.e. they are truly live updating) on my iPod classic.

 

[Dembo]

SOLVED (well, almost).

Most of my Podcast smart playlist are based on a smart playlist used to catch videos (Video Type is Movie if I remember correctly).

Turns out that as long as I have a reference to this smart playlist somewhere in my playlists they will not live update. Change this base smart playlist to

Kind contains audio

Basically solved the issue. Live playlists are now live updating on the device.

I still have a problem with unchecked playlists being synced to the device but I'll put this issue in a different thread.

 

[sal]

this "bug" is still not fixed in 3.0

smart playlists live update on iphone AS LONG AS the smart-playlist doesn't reference another playlist in the conditions.

Kind of a drag since most of my smart playlists, depend on other playlists to compile.