Smart playlists broken in Music.app

One of the annoyances I’ve found in switching from Mojave to Big Sur (skipping Catalina) is that smart playlists are broken in Music.app:

  1. Create a smart playlist (containing songs from several albums)
  2. Switch to Songs view in natural sorted order
  3. Reorder some of the songs
  4. Quit Music.app and restart it
  5. Expected behaviour: the playlist retains its natural order
  6. Actual behaviour: the playlist has been resorted in order of Artists and Albums

It’s been like this in every version of Music.app that Apple have released since I upgraded to Big Sur. I reported it in Apple’s “Feedback Assistant” (their successor to Bug Reporter / Radar) a while back.