Smart playlists with Apple Music

[Rantipole]

Hi. I have a few smart playlists in iTunes. One of the parameters some of the playlists use is "total play count". For example, one smart playlist picks my least played songs.

Needless to say (perhaps?), these playlists were developed before Apple Music. They were based on songs I had in iTunes to begin with.

I'm considering switching to Apple Music, but I don't see how I can maintain these if I put all my purchased music on the cloud. I don't think the cloud songs will "see" how many plays I've had, and if I play a song off of the cloud, that won't "talk" to my computer and tell iTunes the song has been played.

Or will it? Has anyone tried to do this?

 

[Rantipole]

Hmm... well, I'm guessing there's no way around this and that's why there have been no responses. Oh well, back to Spotify I go!

 

[Rantipole]

Argh. I'm noticing now Apple Music totally screwed up some other playlists, too. Not just the smart playlists. WTF!

 

[Dario69]

Argh. I'm noticing now Apple Music totally screwed up some other playlists, too. Not just the smart playlists. WTF!

I didn’t have an answer but have been following this thread to see if someone did. So did you turn on Apple Music briefly before moving to Spotify? What happened to the playlists?

I was thinking this one out a bit because I was disappointed to see there is no “true” play history that is saved with your Apple Music account except for what you have in your library. I even tried messing with the transparency data that you can request with all of your Apple account activity. Even that seems limited do some reason.

Taking this experience into account I would really be surprised if your iTunes play history converted over when flipping the Apple Music switch. I wish it was more complete to include activity outside of your saved music library or at least accessible. If iMessage can tell me what recent songs I played on a radio station the Apple Music app should as well. That is just poor design. Like one development team is doing a better job than the other. This plus the fact Apple Music keeps throwing my dislikes back at me, every day, ad nauseam. One day I think I got 80% of my dislikes recommended to me. That is just plain bad.

Sorry for the rant. Good luck with this issue.

 

[Rantipole]

I didn’t have an answer but have been following this thread to see if someone did. So did you turn on Apple Music briefly before moving to Spotify? What happened to the playlists?

OK, I'll try to guess what happened to my regular playlists which also got screwed up.

I've got a bunch of songs sitting in iTunes. When I tried to do more with Apple Music on my iPhone, it required me to turn on the cloud on both my phone AND my Mac. Somehow during this process, I think Apple Music only "saw" some of my music in the playlist, then decided to say, OK that's the complete playlist now. And then AM tossed aside the other songs in that playlist. So now I have to replicate the playlist somehow.

EDIT: No, wait. AM did not require me to do anything with iCloud on the Mac, I think. But when I turned it on the phone, it discarded everything that was synced to the phone via iTunes. So then, I think it took a playlist and only kept the songs I had on the cloud? And then synced that back to the Mac? Even though I did not turn on iCloud for Apple Music on the Mac? Is that possible?

Anyway, this whole process is a direct result of the fact that you have to turn on AM for the cloud in order to download music to your phone. Why? Why can't I just download an album or playlist I want to listen to, without mucking around with everything else? I don't get that.

Anyway, just a guess.