Music: Cannot play this item. There was a problem playing this on your iPhone

[jennyp]

Fast-forwarding this thread to date, I find that, using an Apple Watch S7 A2478 with 8.6, in the case of fixing an non-purchased album that's no longer on the music store, if you grab a plID from some random album (one you know that you'll never purchase), then playing to an iPhone remotely works, but no artwork displays in the watch music list, even if you've embedded it in the file. It's odd, because while it's playing, a blurred version of the embedded artwork does seem to show behind the controls. Getting a plID with the correct artwork does show that artwork in the list.

Even so, it's all quite a chore. Some better automation is needed.

But I wish Apple would just fix this. It seems wrong that it works if you get a Music subscription - but I won't do that again - I get the wrong recordings of my best classical music.

 

[bubu92]

Apple Watch 8 (A2773) / wOS 9.1, exact same issue still persisting.
My first watch and I didn't really believe that this was happening.

However, instead of thinking too long about the whys and how long fors, I wanted a solution. And it should not be buying Apple Music.

Adding ITUNESALBUMID using Mp3tag works like charm, at least for playback. Tried it on an album with a single track first and the watch played it instantly, no matter if I selected it via artist or album, after re-adding the track to itunes and syncing with the phone. Fine for now, at least I can play what I want using the watch only.

What I don't like is that the album art embedded into the file (by itunes itself) is still not showing on the watch, only blurred in the background when playing, but not visible in the list view. I like my list colorful. Does anyone know what field the music player of the watch uses to display the art, or, if it tries to fetch it from apple music using the ID? That would be surprising, even for apple... I think it must be something in the file but I am not buying a single track from Apple just to look at the metadata.

Any info appreciated! I am new to this forum, please bear with me if I missed something already stated before.

 

[bubu92]

To answer my own question: album art does appear on the watch, it just needs a while to copy it from the phone and only does so when connected to wifi. No further action needed there.

To sum up, if you sync music to your phone that is not from Apple, follow these steps (at least on Windows) to be able to start playback of any albums/tracks from the watch:

1) Convert all tracks to m4a (you can use e.g. VLC Convert/Stream feature but also iTunes itself does this via File/Convert).
2) Use Mp3tag or another tool of your choice to add the extended tag ITUNESALBUMID to all m4a files (I also added ITUNESARTISTID). You can get these IDs from the website of Apple Music, it is the number in the url, e.g. for ABBA it is 372976, ABBA's Waterloo album has 1440557051. Mp3tag allows you to edit multiple files at once, so its doable even for larger music libraries in an acceptable amount of time. If Apple Music doesn't have your tracks, you can add any arbitrary number that differs from the ones you already have in your music library, but be sure to pick one that at least for now does not represent something you may add later (check on Apple Music, enter it as an url and see where it leads). The reason for this is that the watch only uses the number to tell your iPhone what to play, your phone presumably looks for an ID match in your music library and starts the playback, although this is only an assumption.
3) Add the tagged m4a files to your iTunes library. If the music was already in the library, delete it, and re-add the correctly tagged files. This will reset some info as e.g. how many times played, but I can live with that.
4) Sync music to the phone. The watch will sync when connected to wifi instantly.
5) Start the playback of the tagged music to see if it works.

For me this works fine and I am now happy with my watch, I can change music based on artist/album using the watch when I am walking without the need to get the phone out of my pocket, which was one of the reasons I got the watch in the first place.

Thanks for all the great posts in this thread, could not have done this without your help!

In your face, Apple Computer.

 

[Bill Av]

To answer my own question: album art does appear on the watch, it just needs a while to copy it from the phone and only does so when connected to wifi. No further action needed there.

To sum up, if you sync music to your phone that is not from Apple, follow these steps (at least on Windows) to be able to start playback of any albums/tracks from the watch:

1) Convert all tracks to m4a (you can use e.g. VLC Convert/Stream feature but also iTunes itself does this via File/Convert).
2) Use Mp3tag or another tool of your choice to add the extended tag ITUNESALBUMID to all m4a files (I also added ITUNESARTISTID). You can get these IDs from the website of Apple Music, it is the number in the url, e.g. for ABBA it is 372976, ABBA's Waterloo album has 1440557051. Mp3tag allows you to edit multiple files at once, so its doable even for larger music libraries in an acceptable amount of time. If Apple Music doesn't have your tracks, you can add any arbitrary number that differs from the ones you already have in your music library, but be sure to pick one that at least for now does not represent something you may add later (check on Apple Music, enter it as an url and see where it leads). The reason for this is that the watch only uses the number to tell your iPhone what to play, your phone presumably looks for an ID match in your music library and starts the playback, although this is only an assumption.
3) Add the tagged m4a files to your iTunes library. If the music was already in the library, delete it, and re-add the correctly tagged files. This will reset some info as e.g. how many times played, but I can live with that.
4) Sync music to the phone. The watch will sync when connected to wifi instantly.
5) Start the playback of the tagged music to see if it works.

For me this works fine and I am now happy with my watch, I can change music based on artist/album using the watch when I am walking without the need to get the phone out of my pocket, which was one of the reasons I got the watch in the first place.

Thanks for all the great posts in this thread, could not have done this without your help!

In your face, Apple Computer.

I hope that you’re not planning on upgrading WatchOS; the latest upgrade takes it away again

In your face - Apple Computer

 

[slowpoke]

I can confirm that watchos 10 does not fix this bug.

When I browse my local phone library on my watch, all individual songs are greyed out and unselectable, whether I go straight to the Songs view or descend via Album or Artist > Album. When browsing by album, the play button in the bottom left is greyed out and unresponsive.

Playlists are busted too. Manually assembled playlists have a greyed out play button, but my single smart playlist of recently added music works fine.

"Shuffle all" works as expected, but obviously isn't what I want.

When I attempt to select a suggested album from the "listen now" view, it instead starts playing the alphabetically first album in my library (which has a title that starts with an ellipsis).

They are never going to fix this, huh. My fault for being a dinosaur who refuses to ever give up my locally stored music I guess!

 

[ichikasuto]

I'm also seeing an issue with watchOS 10, but I think it's due to the removal of the "On iPhone" button in the Music app. I converted almost my entire library using the plID tag mentioned by davehensley and that was effective in getting my library to play via the watch, but I could only play them when going through On iPhone -> Library -> Albums/Playlists/etc. rather than Library -> Albums/Playlists/etc. which I think tries to go through the watch's music library.

Not sure why they decided to remove it with this update but I think that's likely the cause and I hope they fix it in a future update.

 

[Bill Av]

I can confirm that watchos 10 does not fix this bug.

When I browse my local phone library on my watch, all individual songs are greyed out and unselectable, whether I go straight to the Songs view or descend via Album or Artist > Album. When browsing by album, the play button in the bottom left is greyed out and unresponsive.

Playlists are busted too. Manually assembled playlists have a greyed out play button, but my single smart playlist of recently added music works fine.

"Shuffle all" works as expected, but obviously isn't what I want.

When I attempt to select a suggested album from the "listen now" view, it instead starts playing the alphabetically first album in my library (which has a title that starts with an ellipsis).

They are never going to fix this, huh. My fault for being a dinosaur who refuses to ever give up my locally stored music I guess

It’s just another feature that they’ve decided to sunset without telling anyone. It’s not coming back. I can’t find anything that says that you can play back your phone-stored music library on your watch - just your Apple Music, which is somewhat nebulous. It can be speculated that Apple is doing it to force you to pay for a subscription, but it’s probably far more boring; they don’t want to put in the effort to maintain something that isn’t being used by many users, they want to keep the code as tight as they can, and there’s no chance of a class action suit over something so small

 

[Bill Av]

I’m able to start music from my watch again with WatchOS 11. I can’t select individual songs to play, but I can start playing an album. I still manually add the AlbumID to the music that I rip, so it might not work for everyone.

I don’t know. It stopped working later in the day. Started working again the next day

 

[slowpoke]

Holy ****. Just spent ten minutes playing around with it and it is actually semi-working now. Only semi- because individual songs are still greyed out and unselectable; instead I have to play an album from the start and navigate with the skip forward/back buttons. It'll be nice finally being able to change playlist halfway through a run without having to stop and dig my phone out of my belt with my nasty sweaty hands after having not had that option for the entire two goddamn years that I've owned this watch.

Fully expecting it to spontaneously break again next time I actually go running though. lol. lmao.