Smart Playlist filter bug or limitation
S
Stephen Cupp
I bought this app for my Mac mainly to try out the MCP and Shortcuts. So I decided to create a collection that contains all my Christmas albums. For all the albums I owned before I subscribed to Apple Music the genre is Christmas. For everything I added after I subscribed the genre is set to Holiday. I also only want the albums and not the playlists.
So my shortcut needs to be Albums that have a genre of Christmas or Holiday. I couldn't get find album to do and for some and or for others. So I made two. The first one filtered out the playlists then the second one just kept the Christmas and Holiday albums. When I hooked that up to the Create Playlist and run the Shortcut and it just pops up a dialog to select albums.
When I tried the MCP server I ran this prompt. "Add any album with a genre of Christmas or Holiday to the playlist named Christmas". I messed up and said playlist instead of collection. So it made a regular collection instead of a smart suggestion, but it worked.
I then tried. "Add any playlist with a genre of Christmas or Holiday to the collection named "Christmas Playlists"" and it created a playlist that has all the Christmas/Holiday albums and playlists.
I then tried "Add any album with a genre of Christmas or Holiday to the collection named "Christmas Albums"". It then created the playlist with every album in it. This is the input.
{
"name": "Christmas Albums",
"filter": {
"filters": [
{
"field": "genre",
"value": {
"type": "contains",
"value": "Christmas"
}
},
{
"field": "kind",
"value": {
"type": "equals",
"value": "album"
}
},
{
"field": "genre",
"value": {
"type": "contains",
"value": "Holiday"
}
},
{
"field": "kind",
"value": {
"type": "equals",
"value": "album"
}
}
],
"mode": "or"
}
}
Adrian Schönig
Stephen Cupp That's an interesting one.
The issue is that the "find" action and smart collections only allows either an "or" or an "and" filter, but not a combination of the two.
The LLM struggles with that and then does silly thing here like "genre contains holiday or kind is album" which will then just return all albums.
You can achieve that with a Shortcut by using the "find albums" twice. First filter all albums by one criteria and then pipe the output of that into a second "find albums" action with the other set of criteria. That way you can first do "all albums with genre is 'Holiday' or genre is 'Christmas'" and then filter those results by "kind is album". (See screenshot.)
However, when you try to save that as a smart collection, that's indeed not yet supported as smart collections currently only support one filter.
That is expected behaviour and a limitation at this stage.