Downloaded music keeps disappearing from my iPhone

[lc.reinhold]

I must admit, Apple support has actually been quite good concerning my ongoing problems with Apple Music. When I called Apple via the number on their web page, I received a call back from a real live person within 15 minutes. They quickly passed me up to the next tier as soon as I described the problem. The second person was unable to solve my problem, made some suggestions and asked me to email him back with the results. He called me back on Sunday, and made the Apple Store appointment for me. The person at the Apple Store could not solve the problem, and told me he would write something that gave me priority to the next tier of support. Each time they made an effort to "reflect" a feeling - "You must be very frustrated", "I know this is frustrating".

During each of these encounters, I received an email from Apple asking for feedback, which I was happy to give, including my dissatisfaction that the problem remained. During this process, they asked if I would be willing to receive a phone call about it, and I said yes.

Since last week, all my music disappeared from the Music app, several times I had been able to reinstall the music only for it to disappear again. This last time it took many tries to try and again download the music, but today I was able to get 4,700 songs back on my iPhone. But I'm waiting for them to disappear again.

This evening, I received a phone call from a senior tech at the local Apple Store. He was very knowledgeable, and some of his comments reflected he had seen my written feedback. We discussed the previous attempts and noted when I wiped the iPhone to the factory settings, I had restored the phone from my iTunes backup. I knew he was going to recommend wiping it again, and this time do a clean install, which in my case would be extremely time consuming. He did suggest wiping the iPhone again, suggesting either a clean install, or doing a restore from the iCloud backup vice the iTunes backup on my laptop. I knew the iTunes backup is a direct copy of what was on the iPhone, including software patches/updates from the original, which end up taking excess space on the iPhone and can possibly be corrupted. He then explained an iCloud backup/restore does a clean install of iOS to the latest version I had installed (not copying back the original plus patches which might be corrupted), and will restore everything back to the way I had my iPhone set up, including the wallpaper, etc. I will have to redo my fingerprint scans, and extra Credit Cards in Passbook as this is only stored locally on the iPhone.

I have so many apps, it was about to exceed the free iCloud storage space, so had excluded most of the apps in the iCloud backup that the iPhone does automatically everyday. So to make this painless, I purchased 20GB of iCloud storage, and have made an iCloud backup which includes all my apps.

Then Apple just released iOS 8.4.1 (which reportedly has many fixes to Apple Music but not the problem I've been having), so I installed this first, then backed it all up to iCloud, wiped the iPhone to factory new, and am now restoring from iCloud. This time it has already begun downloading music, which is a good sign. I'm hoping this solves the problem, since it was running fine until one week ago when all the songs went missing.

The same issues occurred to me, too. I'm running iOS 9 PB 3 and all my downloaded playlists are now greyed out, still the available memory did not increase. Just as you described. Disabling and enabling iCloud Music Library didn't change anything.

Seems like this issue occurs with Apple Music on iOS 9 and iOS 8.4.X...

I reported this to Apple with the iOS 9 Beta Feedback Assistant. Let's see, how this goes.

 

[andyp350]

Compared to Spotify and Deezer for example its ****. Both are much faster to respond (playback is almost instant in my case unlike Apple music). I have not lost any music from my library or from offline downloads and basically no other quirks like i get on apple music basically everyday.

All comes down to iTunes backbone whatever it is and iCloud. Thats the core issue and everyone at apple just keeps adding more stuff to a very flawed service that it is to begin with.

I have experienced the issue on the Spotify iOS app many times. I'd be in offline mode and some songs just don't play, the album artworks and track details display but it just sticks at 0.00 as the file has gotten lost, I had to re-sync it when I was back on wifi/3g.
Apple music has been ok for the most part, i've experienced lost tracks once, but it was most of my library which was very annoying.

 

[Nikhil72]

It's frustrating to have lost all my offline downloaded music and I downloaded Spotify again last night but it too frustrated me because of its awful local files sync, which just did not want to work. Maybe I need to just start buying all my music again.

 

[rmcnelly]

Well, the iCloud backup failed to restore my iPhone, freezing up as it tried to reinstall my apps. So I've again wiped the phone and am doing a clean install of everything.

 

[rmcnelly]

My iPhone 6 Plus seemed to get warm and have trouble with it's WiFi, and was unable to complete several attempts to restore from the iCloud last night. I wiped it twice and both restores failed. I wiped it again and attempted a clean install of some apps which seemed to work, and I was able to get about 500 songs onto the phone. By lunchtime, the songs had mysteriously disappeared again. I spoke to the manager of the Apple Store, and he had me bring it in after work, and replaced the iPhone without me needing an appointment at the store. This will be the last troubleshooting step, to rule out a hardware problem. I was able to successfully restore from the iCloud to the new iPhone, so I think the old phone did have some problem. Now to see if I can get some music on it.

 

[lc.reinhold]

My iPhone 6 Plus seemed to get warm and have trouble with it's WiFi, and was unable to complete several attempts to restore from the iCloud last night. I wiped it twice and both restores failed. I wiped it again and attempted a clean install of some apps which seemed to work, and I was able to get about 500 songs onto the phone. By lunchtime, the songs had mysteriously disappeared again. I spoke to the manager of the Apple Store, and he had me bring it in after work, and replaced the iPhone without me needing an appointment at the store. This will be the last troubleshooting step, to rule out a hardware problem. I was able to successfully restore from the iCloud to the new iPhone, so I think the old phone did have some problem. Now to see if I can get some music on it.

It's hard for me to see, how this is a hardware problem. The software simply does not recognise, that the songs are already downloaded. Should be a software bug, imo.

It's especially weird, since both of us had the same problems around the same time. Before that everything worked fine and I didn't have one single problem with Apple Music.

I will try a clean install early next week, when I have better wifi and my local Mac around. Will report back then, if it works for me.

 

[rmcnelly]

It's hard for me to see, how this is a hardware problem. The software simply does not recognise, that the songs are already downloaded. Should be a software bug, imo.

It's especially weird, since both of us had the same problems around the same time. Before that everything worked fine and I didn't have one single problem with Apple Music.

I will try a clean install early next week, when I have better wifi and my local Mac around. Will report back then, if it works for me.

I agree this was weird that we both had the music begin disappearing about the same time. Mine had also been working fine before that.

My iPhone 6 Plus must have developed a problem in its WiFi circuitry, since it would heat up and was unable to download the restore from the iCloud. I believe this was unrelated to the Music problem.

The new phone downloaded the restore from the iCloud fine. The Music app initially had some problems, not displaying my list of songs or playlists. I signed in and out of iTunes and it showed my "Purchased" playlist, which I was able to download overnight (3,100 songs). It listed other playlists, but not the songs they contained. I discovered the "iCloud Music" toggle had mysteriously turned itself off. I turned it back on and was initially worried because the songs and playlists in the Music app disappeared and the display showed a "loading" progress bar that didn't seem to be moving. After a few minutes it showed some progress and after awhile loaded a complete list of music and playlists, and began downloading the Apple Playlists songs I had before.

Currently there are 3,400 songs on the phone. We will see if any disappear during the day, or if Apple Music or the iTunes Music Library turn themselves off again.

 

[rmcnelly]

All my purchased music disappeared again this morning. It was all there until I began making several playlists available for offline use.

Since not all of my purchased music had successfully downloaded, I selected the "Purchased" playlist to download as well. I don't know if that was the cause.

 

[rmcnelly]

The problem remains, even after wiping and restoring the new phone again.

AppleCare support nor the Apple Store have been able to solve this. The Apple Store manager suggested asking for help from this page next:

https://getsupport.apple.com/GetproductgroupList.action

 

[yg17]

The problem remains, even after wiping and restoring the new phone again.

AppleCare support nor the Apple Store have been able to solve this. The Apple Store manager suggested asking for help from this page next:

https://getsupport.apple.com/GetproductgroupList.action

Jesus, what a piece of **** Apple Music is turning out to be.

 

[lc.reinhold]

I'm currently restoring my iPhone 6 from an iCloud Backup. I will report back, when I check if Apple Music works without major issues.

 

[NavySEAL6]

I just updated to 8.4.1. Now, all of the music I previously selected "available offline" no longer shows and gives me the option to download again. It seems the space is still used on my phone and music isn't recognizing them

Anyone else?

 

[lc.reinhold]

So, this is getting interesting.

I just finished the complete restore from iCloud (took a while, to load all the pictures...). Now I went into the music app and all my playlists were shown. The whole iCloud Music Library. Seemed fine so far.
Then I selected about 10 playlists for offline listening. After 100/400 songs were downloaded, the music app turned white and the loading screen "load playlists" showed again (this screen normally only shows, when you log in with your Apple ID and use the music app for the first time). During this screen the progress bar of my song downloads continued to move forward at the top of the screen.
When I was able to look at the playlists again, all of the ones I selected for offline listening weren't selected anymore. Still the app was downloading in the back, as you can see in the Screenshot I attached to this post (the playlist was selected for offline listening before the "load playlists" screen showed up again).

This definitely looks like a bug in my opinion. What do you guys think? Does someone have an idea?

 

[lc.reinhold]

I couldn't stop thinking about that situation, since it's the first time I saw the reason for the issue at first hand.

To me it looked like the app crashed once and forgot about all the settings from before the crash. If the app isn't stable enough, perhaps this could happen any time and as a result the downloads aren't shown in the app, but still take up memory on your device.

 

[marc2508]

Hey guys,

have the same problem. I'm so disappointed because on Spotify everything went well even though the app had to download 2000+ songs. On Apple Music, I can only download my songs (purchased + Apple Music) in a stable way on iTunes (OS X) but not on my iPhone. They are all getting deleted after a while. The man at the genius bar told me to wait for an update because there isn't a fix or workaround available so far...

 

[rmcnelly]

The guy from AppleCare called me back, and is writing a request for engineering support to look into this issue. Both the Apple Store manager and the AppleCare rep had never heard of anyone having this problem before.

 

[NavySEAL6]

Good for you I'm looking forward to seeing what happens. This is basically the difference between me keeping apple music or not

 

[Mazenat]

I am facing something similar, I wrote all about it on my thread
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ailable-offline-music-on-apple-music.1908451/

 

[rmcnelly]

During many attempts to restore the iPhone, I've noticed once all the apps, photos etc are loaded, and the Music app lists music, that the restore is still in progress. When I turned off the phone, then turned it back on, there was small print at the bottom of the lockscreen stating the restore was in progress. If I go to my backups in Settings, it also would show the restore was still in progress.

During these times if I tried downloading my music again, at some point the music app screen would white out, then show a progress bar as it loaded my music and playlists (probably the Music app attempting it's restore). This would erase any music I downloaded manually. So I tried a restore and waited for the Music app to do it's thing, but it continued to fail at either downloading the music or it would disappear again.

This last time, after my apps, photos etc were restored, I went into settings and cancelled the remaining restore. I then logged out of iTunes and Music, signed back in, and again tried downloading my "Purchased" playlist. This was succesful last night, over 3,100 songs succesfully downloaded. It did appear to get stuck downloading some songs, but when I opened iTunes and looked at active downloads, they suddenly completed the download. I then had the iPhone do a backup to the iCloud overnight hoping this would be a clean backup.

This morning the 3,100 songs were still there, and I was able to download some of the Apple playlists, and some of my other music that was not purchased from Apple.

As I type this the iPhone has 3,490 songs and 9 music videos (which I don't want downloaded) on it, and the Music app appears stuck trying to download 3 songs. It plays the downloaded music fine, and everything seems to be working normally.

I'm waiting for the songs to disappear again. I've not gone more than 24 hours without the music vanishing since these symptoms began nearly 2 weeks ago.

 

[rmcnelly]

The Music app has remained stable and no music has disappeared since my last post. I've continued to make music available for offline use, both from my own music and from the iTunes Music Library. The iPhone currently has 5,815 songs on it, and another 22 songs appear stuck in the download process.

 

[rmcnelly]

Still stable, the issue appears resolved.

 

[NavySEAL6]

I haven't lost anything I downloaded either. I think 8.4.1 wiped my available offline music so I'm starting fresh, but the disappearing issue seems to be gone.

 

[thedon1]

I added a playlist to my library, then download all of the songs for offline play on my iPod touch. Worked fine in my car. 2 days later, all of the songs in that playlist apart from 1 had been removed!

So frustrating.

 

[lc.reinhold]

On iOS 9 PB 3 the issue still occurs. About 5 playlists went offline again and the memory is still taken. I also can't make them available offline again. There's no download starting, every time I Try. For every other playlist I want to download, it works. Looks like it's just with some playlists, that were already downloaded...

 

[Jimmyjamh]

I lost all my downloads yesterday morning. Phone had been locked in my pocket. Plugged in my headphones and got a message saying iCloud music couldn't be added then all my music was gone. Interestingly I got a text from my wife 30 mins later saying hers had been deleted too.