Two smart playlists with exact same rule have different amount of tracks

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Two smart playlists with exact same rule have different amount of tracks

I have two smart playlists with the exact same rule:

Favourite / Suggest Less is not Favourite

Both are live updating with no limit.

One has 16,166 items, the other has 14,679 items. The only difference is one was created in the past and the other more recently.

This has persisted across:

Reboot Music app
Restart MacbookPro
Disable and re-enable cloud music library on macOS music
macOS 15.3
macOS 15.3.1

Why?

There are many other bugs with smart playlists and folders containing smart playlists in Music, they are off topic but a few others I deal with:

After creating a smart playlist editing the name won't persist, and on relaunch of Music app the playlist itself does not exist
After creating a smart playlist editing the name works, however on relaunch of Music app the name has reverted to "Playlist"
On launching Music app and clicking on a playlist folder, it displays the name and songs of a completely different playlist. After a minute or so this seems to fix itself.
Playlists just disappearing, ie I just disabled and re-enabled cloud music library and all the playlists in a folder, which were created years ago and before I enabled cloud music library, simply vanished.
Moving playlists between folders occasionally does not persist across Music app relaunches.

All of this adds up to me becoming increasingly stressed. I have poured so much time into managing my iTunes / Music library over 20 years now and I am starting to feel it is either corrupt or Apple Music is so broken that it can no longer be trusted.

Any ideas of what to do, what is going on?

MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 15.3

Posted on Feb 14, 2025 06:25 PM

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Answer 1

turingtest2

Level 10

277,729 points

Mar 4, 2025 04:49 AM in response to m_k_e

Things to try:

Hold down Option when launching Music and use the Choose Library... option to explicitly reselect your Music library, normally at ~/Music/Music/Music Library.musiclibrary. It seems that Music can occasionally get connected to a cached version of the library that may not update correctly.

Hold down Option+Cmd when launching Music which opens the app in its safe mode, and may do some housekeeping on various internal indexes.

Turn live updating off and on again on these lists in case the checkbox doesn't really reflect some internal state that makes these lists update.

You can refresh a smart playlist by selecting all of the contents and deleting them. The rules will be applied again. This is typically more useful when you have a list with a limited number of tracks and random selection criteria, but it can be used on any smart playlist.

Cloud shared playlists can only contain eligible content. If one of the lists originally contained such content it might feature more tracks, but not be shared with your iCloud Music Library. The newer list created while Apple Music was active might automatically ignore such items.

tt2

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Answer 2

m_k_e Author

Level 1

10 points

Mar 4, 2025 04:30 AM in response to m_k_e

73 views and no replies.

Same issue persists, two smart playlists with exact same rules and different amounts of track in them.

I guess this is a bug, what other explanation could there be.

How am I meant to trust any of my smart playlists now? This is seriously bad software quality.

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Answer 3

m_k_e Author

Level 1

10 points

Mar 4, 2025 02:12 PM in response to turingtest2

Thanks for these great suggestions, and apologies for the ranting.

Whilst testing all of these suggestions I double checked both playlists and realised they were actually different, one was “Favourite is None”, and the other was “Favourite is not Favourite”.

The options for this filter are “Favourite”, “Suggest Less”, “None”. Suspecting suggest less was the culprit I checked both “is” and “is not” suggest less but that gave me 0 and my entire library respectively.

Checking the difference between “Favourite is None” and “Favourite is not Favourite” I get 1426 tracks. The only thing that stands out is most (1337) are cloud matched tracks, otherwise it is a mixed or purchased aac, uploaded aac and uploaded mpeg.

Seems like this filter has some parameter that is different between “is not Favourite” and “is None” that isn’t to do with “Suggest Less”. I’ve checked all the metadata I can think of and can’t find any patterns.

Thanks for the help.

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Answer 4

turingtest2

Level 10

277,729 points

Mar 4, 2025 04:02 PM in response to m_k_e

Not for nothing have I called iTunes, and now Music, the logic puzzle that keeps on giving. There is obviously some difference between "is None" and "is not Favourite" even if it isn't obvious what that is.

tt2

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Two smart playlists with exact same rule have different amount of tracks

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