Q: Apple Music and audiobooks disappeared from iPhone 6S

What I would recommend doing is seeing if a reset will work first holding down the power and home button together it should fix the issue if not I would try to then plug your phone in to your laptop and reseting as new there might be an error in the way it downed loaded iOS see if it helps

bwahl86 wrote:

 

Hard reset did nothing. Nothing was lost on my iPad or MacBook just my iPhone. To make matters worse, it started re-downloading my entire library over cellular without notifying me. I found out when AT&T text me I had gone over my data limit. It just ate 5GB+ in the background. And for all I know it will do the same thing tomorrow! How do I call a human being at Apple to fix this?

That's an unusual occurrence and I do mean unusual. To cover all the bases here, your content is now downloading again to your iPhone? Do you now have access to all of the lost content you were concerned with in the beginning of this thread? Audiobooks can be accessed through iBooks>Purchased. It sounds like your music re-downloaded? Concerning contacting Apple, Contact Apple for support and service - Apple Support. There will be an automated system that you will go through at first so you don't get placed in the department that handles questions about Final Cut instead of an iPhone Support advisor. In the meantime, turn off "Use Cellular Data" under Settings>iTunes & App Store so it waits for you to be on WiFi to initiate automatic downloads and updates.

bwahl86 wrote:

 

Thank you. Yes, the music re-downloaded to my iPhone.  As for the audiobooks, I had to connect by lightning cable to MacBook when I got home. When I go to Settings>iTunes and App Store, the "Use Cellular Data" was already toggled off.  Under Settings>Cellular, Music was toggled on, but the data usage history for Music is less than 1GB (probably from using Apple Music Radio).  Today's data spike seems to show up under Settings>Cellular>System Services>Media Services (over 5GB, similar to the amount appearing on my AT&T account).  Any idea how to toggle off, "Media Services" to prevent this from happening again?  There's no toggle for "System Services" nor "Media Services".  I can turn off "Cellular Data" at large, but that's a pretty terrible workaround to forfeit all cell data until Apple releases a software patch.  Really appreciate the feedback.

Yes, you are correct that there is no toggle for System Services. I would say this is valid information to share with Apple to come to a resolution on. It's the first I've heard of such an instance like this. You can also schedule a call for a time that is more convenient for you by following the prompts in https://getsupport.apple.com/. You could try the basic troubleshooting that is common, but for such an instance, I'd want internal eyes on this as soon as possible if put in your position.

I've been having this problem lately. It seemed conected to updates but today it happened without any updates. I had been listening to a book. Went back to start listening agains and all my books had disappeared. Nothing helped but resynching.

I recently had this happen on my iPhone 6s. Music and Podcasts were all suddenly gone, and I had an unexpectedly large amount of free space available. I typically carry about 25GB of music and podcasts with me. As with other people, the only thing that helped was to re-sync to iTunes on my computer (following a backup and update to iOS 9.3.4). I did notice that although the music appeared to be gone from the iPhone, when I plugged it in to my computer iTunes reported that all the content was there. When I told it to sync, it seemed to reconsider that, and had to copy all of the content back to the phone.

After a few days of normal use, it has happened again today. Unfortunately this time I am several weeks away from being at my computer again, so I'm hoping for another solution.

I have had this exact issue happen to me twice. All the audio books disappear from iBooks and all the music disappears from iTunes on my iPhone 6s with latest iOS. I can tell from my storage usage on the phone that those files are still on it but for whatever reason, the apps don't see them (and why did Apple decide to stick audiobooks in with iBooks after two decades of keeping all audio files together in iTunes? It isn't as if I READ audiobooks, I listen to them, just like music!). Since the vast majority of my library was not purchased through the iTunes store--I am so old I still purchase CDs and import them into iTunes most of the time that I buy music or spoken word recordings--I cannot download from the Cloud most of what disappears. This means I have to wait until I am back at my computer to re-sync the phone, a hassle when I am on a trip. (And don't get me started on why I don't use iTunes match to keep my entire library in iCloud--sounds great in theory but simply read some of the horror stories from people who have had their entire libraries disappear or be completely re- (dis-)organized by this "feature.")

When I got back to my iMac I plugged the 6s in and all the files were still listed as "On my Device" in iTunes but when i tried to select one, an exclamation point appeared next to the filename. Also, even though the phone storage indicated a large chunk of used space that was presumably the audio files, iTunes itself showed no audio data usage on the phone (no orange bar at all). I hit sync and iTunes began reloading all the files back onto my phone. This is fine, but is not a good solution when one is on vacation. There is no reason those files should have disappeared from my phone in the first place. What has Apple done to iTunes? I've been using this program without a single problem for nearly two decades. Now it randomly deletes all the music and audio books I select to carry with me on a trip? Once is a glitch, twice is a problem. Pretty annoying!