There is a bug if you download music. I could reproduce it on iOS pretty easy:
Download a playlist or a radio station
If you click on the three dots and select “update…” → nothing happens.
It only works if you select one of the downloaded items (a Playlist or a radio like 1970s radio) and select “update” one by one.
iOS and PlexAmp are on latest versions. Logs attached.
Plexamp-Logs-2025-06-25-1.zip (390.2 KB)
That is by design.
The top-level refresh is intended to update smart playlists, and fetch missing items.
The per-item refresh is a “harder” refresh which recomputes/redownloads entire things. Since it can be destructive, we don’t do that with the top-level refresh.
OK, so the per items refresh of a smart playlist forces a reload of songs based on your defined rule. I think I got this point. 
I have a smart playlist with the rule: Artist stile > is > southern rock limited to <30> items. I downloaded this playlist and checked the row of the first couple of songs.
Then I selected the “update” button on the download page. The covers flashed shortly but nothing more happened. If I go to “library>playlist” the content of this playlist is newer (it has a different sequence than the one I downloaded).
Shouldn’t the downloaded playlist also been updated in this case? Or do I have to wait a certain amount of time between these two updates?
BTW: I did this on my home WiFi and not in the cellular network.
That is a bit more nuanced, and depends on whether the smart playlist was sorted or not (or was sorted “randomly”).
OK I think I get it. I didn’t know that the download function treats randomly sorted playlists in another way than “sorted by…” playlists.
But that makes perfectly sense because a randomly sorted playlist with 1’000 songs takes more resources to resort than a “added within the last 30 days” after you added a EP with two songs. 
Thank you for your kind explanation! 
I’m facing a similar issue. I have a smart playlists that groups all 4 star and 4 start tracks on my library. If i use the general refresh option, it doesn’t download newly added items to the playlist. If i do the per-playlist refresh it does work.
As described above, it’s a feature and not a bug?
“The top-level refresh is intended to update smart playlists, and fetch missing items.”
That’s my problem. It’s not doing that. I started using Plex again after not using it for almost a year.
Before that, doing a refresh downloaded newly added items to the playlist. Now it does nothing.
If the feature as you describe, then it should download the newly/missing items, as it did before.
Then perform a refresh, and post Plexamp logs, otherwise it’s impossible for us to help you.
2112591706156514.zip (176.9 KB)
Here you go! Let me know if you need anything else.
The name of the playlist in question would be great
Sorry, thought I had said! The name is “Loved Tracks”
So the key is:
It’s not keeping in sync because it likely took a random sample of the playlist, which it does when the smart playlist is a) not ordered or b) ordered by random.
I was sorting the playlist by artist (through the plex web app, not sure if that is possible to do through PlexAmp). I re-did the playlist with the same filtering but this time I sorted by album and that seems to be working. Maybe there was a bug with the original playlist.
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