Interesting to know. I wonder if you lose that functionality if you leave the service. Does joining Apple Music do that "upgrade" thing where it takes over your personal music library and replaces your files with higher bit rate files? I'm not interested in that
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Music: Cannot play this item. There was a problem playing this on your iPhone
- Thread starter Bill Av
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If you look back at my posts you will say I posted saying that the bug was fixed. It was in fact that I had a trial of Apple Music which I canceled.
The songs continued to work even when canceled, BUT if you then restore your phone and re sync your library then it seams to go back to being screwed!
I am going to keep the Apple one service as I will be saving money, I know its not for everyone but seems like the problem is solved for me. I have reporting the bug to apple and supplier information but they don't seem to act on it!
Yep. Still persists. Apple standard response, wipe everthing, restore etc etc etc. They are a multi billion dollar company. I think they should fix it.
Also, the regular version of AtomicParsley (sourceforge.net/projects/atomicparsley) cannot set the plID tag. The fork that can do that is inaccessible.
I found out why this didn't work. The Kid3 tagger program was actually converting the field "Album ID" (as typed) into "plID" (as stored). If the actual field was just "Album ID" then it'd fail. So the better method is to Add a "plID" field directly and enter an album ID value, and then it would work.
Current observations:
- album covers of the added m4a files don't work on my Apple Watch, even though they're visible on iPhone
- this is an INSANE method when dealing with more than a few albums. Unfortunately, this is the only way I've so far been able to get playback to work in more than a year. To get my full library to work, I'd need to:
* make an m4a copy for all my music (huge wasted space)
* find another command line tool like the aforementioned forked version of AtomicParsley (which is no longer available), or develop such a tool myself
* write my own script to automate the process for all my files. I didn't know consumers need to be actual programmers in order to do something as complex as playing a song on an Apple device.
Opinion: Apple Watch is currently an insanely bad solution for my needs -- by far the most unfriendly music playback tool I have ever encountered, considering how much work is needed compared to probably every mp3 player in history. The number of steps required to achieve the intended function is absurd considering the totally basic nature of the function. And, seeing that such a problem remains unfixed after a year, it is not irrational to assume that it may never be fixed, especially if the company has an incentive to ignore the bug so that more consumers may be encouraged to buy their music subscription service; that's assuming the company did not plan all this on purpose in the first place.
I would likely never buy another Apple Watch or recommend it to anyone unless this is fixed.
Add me to the list 😭
it sucks because I got the watch specifically so I could more easily change music while driving. And when it didn’t work (while I was driving btw...) I was a bit miffed, glad I’m not the only one experiencing this though. It sucks even more knowing this issue originated a year ago, and is still happening on my 3 week old Apple Watch SE 😥.
Running iOS 14.1 on an iPhone 8 Plus, and watchOS 7.0.2 on an Apple Watch SE, if that helps.
it sucks because I got the watch specifically so I could more easily change music while driving. And when it didn’t work (while I was driving btw...) I was a bit miffed, glad I’m not the only one experiencing this though. It sucks even more knowing this issue originated a year ago, and is still happening on my 3 week old Apple Watch SE 😥.
Running iOS 14.1 on an iPhone 8 Plus, and watchOS 7.0.2 on an Apple Watch SE, if that helps.
Despite what I wrote in an earlier post, I bought an Apple Watch Series 6. I had a reason for it other than "I need the latest gizmo". I had zero expectations that it would fix any of my AW issues. But anyway, yeah, it didn't fix any of my issues, including the music control problem. Just figured I'd let everyone know.
Not me. My work around even has a problem. Asking Siri (through my EarPods) to play an album causes her to say “Apple Music is having a problem” every time. But then the album starts.
Dave, thank you very much. This is the most helpful post that I find in this thread. I tried your approach and I find it almost accurate. It is possible that since the time that you posted this iPhone/watch was/were modified. I found that plID cannot just be any random number, it should be a valid ID from apple music. Not necessarily the one that is assigned to the specific album, just any existing ID of any album. And the ID must be different for each album. What I also noticed is that you may assign plID just to the first track of each album. This possibly indicates that internally iPhone duplicates lpID to all other tracks while syncing the album. But this is only a guess. However somehow it works when assigning lpId to only the first track.
I used ATL (Audio Tools Library) instead of modifying AtomicParsley. You can find it here: GitHub
I hope that Apple will eventually fix this. I'm surprised that this bug already exist for so long. Perhaps this is a feature intended to force us to use apple music? If this is so, I'm done with Apple. Enough is enough.
Yeah, they will never fix it because they *want* this behavior. Many of us have reported it via Apple's (generally useless) bug reporting tool. My report has been sitting in Apple's queue for many months, with no response from them. And it's still "broken" (as intended) on watchOS 7.3 of course.
Add me to the list of people this is broken for. Just got my new Watch today (first ever, Series 6) and absolutely gutted this doesn’t work. I want to choose my music when I’m out for a run but apparently can’t.
what a joke. Get your act together, Apple. The solution isn’t for me to sign up to your subscription service. I don’t spend more money on a service when the initial experience is inferior; I don’t spend money to fix a problem that should work
what a joke. Get your act together, Apple. The solution isn’t for me to sign up to your subscription service. I don’t spend more money on a service when the initial experience is inferior; I don’t spend money to fix a problem that should work
ATL is a library, is there a program that is ready made that uses this library? I don't know enough (yet) of .Net to write my own simple program to use this.
Yes it persist on IoS15 and watchos8 … and I don’t want using Apple Music service for the moment.
I have making some reset an I see ten or eleven device on health..
I don't want to erase because I have activities that I want to keep.... Besides, the loading of the exercises is very slow…
The gps is still not accurate on the exercise application, I lose a lot of meters…
Every topic was discussed with Apple and I never got a solution.
All of these since installation of the iOS13 beta may be?!?
All these problems must come from iCloud because my son recovers my old watch and phone and he has no problem… I’m jealous ! 🙈
Sorry, this was an incorrect message. Apparently, this is working for me because I recently activated my apple music subscription. I cracked because they started to support lossless music. I will probably discontinue this subscription and will remain with my Tidal subscription which I like better. So I will surely hit this problem again.
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Not for me. Same version IOS15.0.2 and watchOS 8.0.1 with Apple Watch Series 4 and no Apple Music subscription and always this beautiful message… 
From Apple perspective this is not broken. This is how it meant to be. They want us to buy Apple music subscription. If you have this subscription, everything works.
The least they could do is be honest about it being an (arbitrarily) subscription-gated feature.
Also, I happened to buy a pair of beats headphones that came with an Apple Music trial today, and I decided to activate it to see if it fixed the issue like that other poster suggested it would... nope, still just as broken as before.
Also, I happened to buy a pair of beats headphones that came with an Apple Music trial today, and I decided to activate it to see if it fixed the issue like that other poster suggested it would... nope, still just as broken as before.
It looks like MP3Tag can now edit an MP4 file's plID tag in version 3.07 or later (they call it ITUNESALBUMID apparently). I haven't tried it, but this might be useful for those who wanted to download the now-deleted AtomicParsley fork. https://www.mp3tag.de/en/download.html
I picked it up on the Mac App Store. I bought an album, tagged it and transferred it to my iPhone. I was able to initiate playback from my watch, so it seems to work. I did a few more albums that I had in my Music library, but they didn't sync over. I expected this, as changing metadata doesn't cause a file to transfer over when you next sync - you've got to remove it from the phone first.
Anyway, I'll play with it over the next few days and decide what I'm going to do. Adding the Album ID to 2500 albums would be time consuming.
I see in the preferences that you can add any field to the tag panel. That simplifies it a ton.
Update
It’s been a few days and I think I can safely say that this works. I can control music that I’ve added AlbumID to. However, you can’t just edit the metadata while the files are in your library; you have to import the files into Music/iTunes after the metadata has been added. No surprise, but adding AlbumID does nothing if the track is an MP3; it’s got to be an AAC. You can add AlbumID to ALAC files, but I don’t think the info carries over if you use iTunes to convert it to AAC.
For music that isn’t available in the store, you can seemingly use another album’s ID without an issue - it won’t change the album title or track names. One caveat: you may get different album artwork if you don’t have artwork embedded in the files. I would say that you shouldn’t use an AlbumID of something that you may get in the future.
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