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Fixing the iPhone Smart Playlist Ordering Bug

When I'm home at my parent's place in North Carolina, I become tech support for the various problems my parents (mostly my dad) have had since the last time I visited. I like the role (especially when I can fix the problem), and it lets me learn things that I wouldn't encounter otherwise.

This Christmas, my dad brought me a problem I'd never had before: the smart playlists on his iPhone wouldn't sort the songs in the way they were sorted in iTunes on his Windows machines. No matter the order it showed in iTunes, the iPhone only ever showed them in an order decided by some criteria I could never figure out.

After some Googling and reading through long, long threads on the Apple forums, I finally got the workaround to fix it. It's kind of a ridiculous fix, in that Apple needs to fix it permanently, but it works. It's simple:
  1. Open up the properties of the playlist (File > Get Info OR right-click > Edit smart playlist)
  2. Add a new condition to the playlist: Playlist > Is > Music.
  3. Save the playlist and re-sync your iPhone.

That's it! It worked perfectly for my Dad. Comments? Followups? You know where the comments are.

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