Q: iOS Music Player Glitches
Hello everyone. About a year ago I received a 128 gig iPod touch. It's been a great product, and I've never had an issues with it, aside from a few strange occurrences with the iOS music player app that have unfortunately very frustrating and time consuming.
I'm a huge music lover, which is why I got the 128 gig model, and with over 11,000 songs, I knew I would need that extra memory. I have a few apps that I rarely uses (like Facebook, maybe Instagram here and there), but 99% of the time I use it to load music on, and listen to music while commuting, out for a walk etc. Because of the sheer amount of music on the iPod itself, I like to keep everything organized. Everything is sorted by album with the correct artwork. Aside from very light app usage and listening to music on a daily basis, I have been very good the iPod itself. Never dropped it, never hastily disconnected it while it was loading music or syncing or anything else that would cause damage or errors. The music on my iPod is mainly MP3 files mixed with some iTunes purchases.
The first issue happened a few months back. I plugged in my iPod to add a few new albums as per usual. This time, when I went to load the songs on, I noticed the "waiting to update iPod" message in iTunes popped up as it does when loading new songs, except this time it stuck. After quite a long while of waiting, I opened the music app on my iPod to see if anything had indeed been added, and most of my album artwork was deleted. I was kind of peeved due to the fact that I took so much time to keep everything organized and to make sure all my albums had cover art. The songs just weren't loading to the iPod, so I decided to disconnect it and try again. This time, after another VERY long updating message, it began to start syncing my music even though I didn't ask it to. This took quite some time, again due to the fact I have over 11,000 songs on my device. Once it was done, I will still missing most of my album artwork. What's more, it would go through this lengthy sync every single time I tried to add new music to my iPod. At this point I was pretty fed up, so I did a wipe of all the music on my iPod which was the only thing that seemed to help, and re-added everything again. Things seemed fine, then the same issue happened again not too long after. The only thing that seemed to fix it was once again deleting all music and adding back everything. This time around, I went in to iTunes and turned off everything to do with syncing. I do not use iCloud, I turned off auto-sync when the iPod is connected and also made sure that I had manually manage music checked off like I would normally.
Once I had done all that, the issue seemed to stop. Months went by, no issues at all. I added music from both my desktop computer AND laptop without an issues. Again, some of this was MP3 some was iTunes store purchases.
Then, just earlier today when I went to add some newly download songs to my iPod, the sync message came up again and stuck and sure enough, when I went to check my iPod's music app....many of my albums were once again missing artwork, and it would try and sync music and artwork to my iPod whenever I try to add more music. I was quite disappointed, so I went into my iPod settings and deleted all my music in preparation to add everything back. However, this time around when I looked at my iPod in iTunes it shows all my songs still there, but when I look at the music app on the iPod itself, it shows it as empty with no songs on the device. So, I had to go through each individual song on my iPod (again, over 11,000 songs) and delete them manually through iTunes. Ugh.
I could find very little about this online. Has anyone else been having issues with the iPod or iPhone's iOS music app doing weird things with album artwork while going through very lengthy update or sync processes? It's getting very time consuming to keep having to re-add songs all the time, especially with such a vast music library. Or, is there something I'm doing wrong or could do to fix this issue?
Thank you for your help!
iPod touch, iOS 9.3.4, iOS music player, music, sync
Posted on Aug 15, 2016 7:53 PM