Music "Recently Played" smart playlist not updating correctly?

[Fallinangel]

Hi,

Since forever, I have a "Recently Played" playlist in iTunes, now called Music.

After moving from Big Sur to Monterey and x86 to ARM, it doesn't seem to work any more.

Recently played titles get appended to the bottom of the playlist, just after not so recently played songs.
At the top of the playlist are still songs that I played recently, a few days ago?
Live updating somehow doesn't seem to work.

Here's how I view the playlist:

I deleted and recreated it, but that didn't seems to change anything.
I also tried to reset warnings and caches, but to no avail.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

 

[TriciaMacMillan]

I don't remember this to ever have worked in my Music app.

 

[Fallinangel]

I don't remember this to ever have worked in my Music app.

For me it worked in the Music app on Big Sur and many, many earlier versions.

 

[EedyBeedyBeeps]

For me it worked in the Music app on Big Sur and many, many earlier versions.

Mine works (in terms of showing the correct order of play), but with several differences.

- The smart playlist has only one rule, which is "Last Played is in the last 6 weeks."
- I don't have "Limit to" selected.
- My "Match only checked/ticked items" is greyed out (but checked/ticked), since I have "song list checkboxes" turned off in Preferences.
- I have View > Sort By > Last Played checked.
- I have View > Sort By > Descending checked.

I'm not sure why yours doesn't work, though. I have iTunes Match, but I'm not subscribed to Apple Music. M1 MacBook Air.

Also, mine doesn't update instantaneously unless I play the song in the Music App on my MacBook. If I use my iPhone, it still takes about day (and other conditions) for the play to register on my MacBook.

 

[EedyBeedyBeeps]

I set up a playlist with the rules same as yours and View > Sort By > Playlist Order. It displays the wrong order of songs same as yours does.

I've tried some other things with the rules, but the only thing that seems to get it to display in the correct order is to set it to View > Sort By > Last Played.

 

[Fallinangel]

Thanks to your reply and some stuff I remembered from a previous problem just yesterday, I finally managed to figure this out.

Turns how you set the smart playlist rules up doesn't matter much, except that you need the "Last Played" "in the last" x number of "days|weeks|months" rule. As you pointed out, setting a limit is not necessary, but it doesn't cause any trouble. I don't use ticks, so that option didn't matter much for me. "Live updating" is of course essential.

What matters most is to "View" the playlist "as songs" (instead of "Playlist").
Then in the View Options (CMD + J) the Last Played column needs to be activated, which is only available in the song view!

After that the playlist can be "Sorted By" this "Last Played" columns in ascending or descending order.

I did a "clean install" when moving from Big Sur to Monterey in May and reconfigured iTunes/Music from scratch.
While doing that I must have forgotten that this is essential to get the recently played playlist going.
Yesterday, while debugging another issue, I somehow remembered this.

Thanks again.