Favorite iTunes playlist missing from 75% of my devices?!

November 11, 2014 8:11 AM

I run iTunes Match on four devices: a 2010 iMac, a 2012 iMac, a 2012 Macbook, and an iPhone 5c. One of my favorite playlists has gone missing on the phone, the Macbook, and the 2012 iMac, but not from the 2010 iMac. What's gone wrong and how can I fix it?

Possibly relevant:

*Although I'm not sure it means anything at this point, the 2010 iMac is the homebase of my iTunes library.

*I updated the phone to iOS 8 about 2 weeks ago.

*Over the last week, I have updated to Yosemite in this order: 2012 iMac first, 2010 Macbook next, 2010 iMac last (a couple of days ago). The updates all went smoothly.

*I noticed the playlist disparity after the 2010 iMac was updated to Yosemite, but I can't be sure it hadn't happened before then.

*The songs from the playlist which I had downloaded to my phone are still on my phone.

To address this, I have tried:
*Rebooting each device.

*Signing off from iTunes Match and back on again on each device.

*Copying the playlist on the 2010 iMac; the copy also does not show up anywhere else.

posted by underthehat to Technology (3 answers total)

Best answer: Ooh ooh ooh, I think I know this. It happened to me last summer when I switched to iTunes Match.

If your playlist has ANY songs that are not available on iTunes Match, it will make the whole playlist disappear from your devices. (For me, it was only one song that made a 700+ song playlist disappear. That's stupid, I think, but iTunes Match is pretty great so I can forgive it.) To figure out which songs might be the culprit, you can click and sort on your master iTunes library by the little "cloud with an arrow" icon. Remove the offending songs and your playlist will magically reappear across all of your devices.

I hope this works for you. It was supremely frustrating to figure that out for me.
posted by AgentRocket at 8:36 AM on November 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

I'm pretty sure AgentRocket has it. iTunes warned me that a playlist I created last week wouldn't be available on my other devices because one of the songs was not available on Match.
posted by malocchio at 8:50 AM on November 11, 2014

Response by poster: Thanks, AgentRocket! I should have thought of this; I've seen that error before but don't remember seeing it recently. When I went to look, however, that playlist did indeed have non-Match tracks. I removed them, and everything's fine again.
posted by underthehat at 8:39 AM on November 12, 2014