Four playlist syncing problems with iTunes in the Cloud
iTunes in the Cloud is a great way of making the songs in your iTunes library available to all of your iOS devices, but it is not without various wrinkles (which will hopefully be ironed out in a later update). Here are some examples of what I mean. I believe that these are only problems when you are also using iTunes Match.
1) Playlist folders don't always sync properly
I have many different playlists, some of which are used for general housekeeping (i.e. to help find songs with no artwork, songs that haven't been played etc.). All of these are placed in a Playlist Folder called 'Stats'. But on my iPhone, I see two folders called 'Stats':
2) You can't create a smart playlist in iTunes if it references other smart playlists
Many of my smart playlists that I created in iTunes can simply not be synced to my iPhone. When you try making such a playlist, you see this error:
3) Item counts in playlists are not respected when you sync them
I have a playlist called 'Hot 100', I deliberately limit this to 100 songs and this works fine on my Mac:
I'm hapy to wait while 100 songs download over WiFi, but I'm going to wait for over 6,000 songs to download.
4) You can't include podcasts in synced playlists
I have mentioned this before, and this is something that already has driven me to use the excellent Downcast app. If you place any podcasts in a playlist then see a warning icon appear next to the playlist name. If you click on this, you'll see the following warning:
These four issues are not problems if you don't use iTunes Match; they all work as expected if you are syncing playlists in the traditional manner of using iTunes to choose which specific playlists will be copied to your iOS device. I really hope that at least some of these problems get addressed in the near future.
