Apple Music is SO SLOW

I can't understand why this isn't a HUGE topic. Apple Music is taking FOREVER to load, and the former versions were pretty quick. I have a "home" computer that I updated to Catalina and a "school" computer that stayed with an older system. I can open Apple Music on the school computer and my music and art will load in under a minuter - usually just a few seconds. Every time I open Apple Music on my home computer it takes several minutes for everything to load. So far everything does, eventually load, but it takes SO LONG!!!!

Same problem, pretty much makes streaming unbearable. And there appears to be no way to adjust buffer size or audio quality manually, so, if the system is supposed to be adjusting these in response to bandwidth, it's doing a terrible job.

Yes, ever since the release of Catalina, Music has been brutally, grotesquely slow.

Every point release since, I've hoped for a fix, but nope, this app is as slow as ever. (And the Music Store portion loads with dial-up speeds on 100 Mbps connections.)

Isn't Apple embarrassed? This is on *both* of my 2019 Macs, an iMac and a MacBook Air.

Essentially brand new machines, and a major application is near unusable.

And I know I'm not alone.

I've sent Apple feedback directly, with zero effect, so at this point... I dunno.

But oh, I can't wait to see what useless knowledge base article gets offered up this time!

Hello,

Same same same.

I have a Macbook pro 32gb from 2018.

Everything works well but Apple Music is so slow.

Same connection and it was faster on spotify...

Starting to regretting Spotify... :s

Help!!

If Apple Music was only slow, that would be bad but it is not the only problem with it. I was able to "solve" the slow problem, by erasing all my playlists folders and almost all my playlists. According to one of the many counsellors to whom I talked at Apple, the fact that I could not get Genius to work was due to the fact I had too many playlists and too many folders. But even if the program is not as slow, it did not solve the Genius problem... It still always give me the same error code 4001.

But there are many other problems.

• the album art: when I look at my Music Library on my older iMac which still works with iTunes, I see all the album art, on which I spent countless hours searching and updating with the best quality covers I could find. But on Apple Music, on my newest iMac (and Catalina), the album art is all messed up. Many missing album art, and in the few that do show up, many are in a very low resolution. Besides, the option to automatically Get Album artwork simple doesn't do anything. If I try the menu option Library Get Album Art, the process seems to do something but stops at 6534 albums, but I have over 25000 albums!
• another mystery is the fact that I very often notice the volume going up while I liste to music, for no reason at all, as it happens often while I am not touching anything;
• as I do a lot of Library maintenance, for example giving an evaluation to songs, I notice all kinds of quirks like: the Song list jumps back at the beginning of the list, even if I am doing something on an artist in the letter T or M; sometimes I double-click on a song to play it, and it is the next one on the list that starts playing;
• on top of all that, I feel the app is behaving badly in many situations: for example, there isn't a Back button in all the situations, which forces me to manually search where I was in the Library, song view.
• I probably spent more that 25 hours on the phone with many apple employees, and they just can't give a solution to all those problems.
• There is more but I have lost enough time with all those problems. I am searching for an alternative to this rotten piece of crap.

The solution is probably to report this as a bug or ditch Apple Music. As a Logic Pro user, it would be more convenient to keep using Apple Music since you can export directly to your music library. If anyone has a link to the bug report please post it so we can vote on it.

My internet connection is great BTW, it even took less than a second to upload this png (which is a quarter of the size of the mp3), and it's taken so far 20 minutes to upload my latest mp3... and it's still going.... One 2MB mp3 from Logic can't go in my Apple Music playlist so that I can listen to it on a run with the rest of the album.

Because of this bug, I get this error every time I want to listen to a song on my phone:

If I have an album of songs I have exported from Logic and I am ready to quit Apple Music I commonly get this error too:

Very annoying. Maybe there's a hack to prioritize Apple Music uploads on my network? Or another app that would be faster to listen to playlists of songs I'm working on from Logic on my phone? Dropbox works great for single songs but it's terrible if I want to listen to a playlist / album / EP I am currently recording.

This is happening on the latest Monterrey 12.5 Beta, but it's been an issue since at least Catalina.

Hey raz273,

Thanks for using Apple Support Communities! I understand you're running into an issue with the Apple Music performance your Mac. I definitely want to make sure you're able to enjoy Apple Music without any issues, and I'm happy to help.

I recommend checking out the resource below and working through the steps there to help with performance issues on the Mac.

If your Mac runs slowly

Thanks again, and have a great day!

I have many playlists, and I organize them into Folders, alphabetically. At one point, I noticed Genius didn't work so I asked for help at Apple support. Since that, they tried to help but nothing worked and eventually, I don't know why, my Music Library became more and more unstable, and I saw that my playlists were reproduced 2 to 5 times each, the same with the folders. As a result, the app became super slow. I asked Apple to solve that and it's been weeks and no help comes, I even asked them to reset the ICloud Music Library to let me start fresh, but they refused. So I decided to try to erase all the folders and playlists. But they keep on Co ING back even after being erased. I don't understand anything anymore.

Same here. so disappointed to be writing this in 2020.

MBP13 2019 16G top spec. Everything runs super fast and very happy with it.

Signed up for Music free trail, but its just such a let down.

App load is serious laggy, takes about 20sec to load the home page, which it had already loaded early in the day, so caching seems way off. Also loading playlist and general navigation is also laggy. Song play pack from cloud is slow, and regularly just drops or fails. Also I have to keep killing some of the BG processes that just rinse my CPU scanning for nonexistent album art or local files, of which I have none, the CPU hogging persists after 5 weeks.... no fixes, no one seems to know why.

Come back iTunes, bloated you where, but at least you responded to my clicks in a timely fashion. Shocker that this got shipped BTH.

Just for the mods, I tried my account on a second MBP, same laggy performance as above. So it's defo not the setup / network or hardware. Defo poor software product and platform.

Spotify continues to be the best platform, year on year, apple has a lot of work to do with Music to win me back, i'll be cancelling my free subscription early, not even worth the hassle, for FREE.

I have a 4 week old MBP 16'', top spec: 64GB RAM, 4TB SSD, 2.4GHz i9, and I came here precisely from a search about this issue. I subscribe to Apple Music, and the app is just so laggy. Everything else runs butter smooth, but this app has some sort of performance issue. Even swiping left and right through spaces goes from butter smooth to janky when I swipe through the app in full screen. Moving the cursor within the app is visibly laggy. Playing or selecting a song is visibly laggy. There's clearly an issue with the app's performance, and it's not related to the Mac itself.

I cannot help but wonder why Apple is so slow to react to basic issues like this which will certainly annoy many users. Other cases like this: Macbook fingerprint sensor being completely useless, AirPods Pro firmware update to fix noise cancellation, ...

I have this same issue. I have an iMac Pro (fully loaded) and a 2019 16" MacBook Pro (also fully loaded). I have a business class 1Gbps internet connection. Latest version of MacOS Catalina on both. I tried the following troubleshooting steps with no results:

1) I've tried reinstalling MacOS Catalina on both computers.

2) I tried creating a new library and restoring from my Cloud Music Library (which took two full days since I have about 20,000 songs in my library).

3) I deleted all of the caches, the plists, etc. associated with the Music app and the AMPLibraryAgent process, restarted, opened Music and let it confirm the sync (which took a couple of hours).

The Music app is still VERY unresponsive, frequently showing the beachball and taking anywhere from 20 seconds to 2 minutes to respond to mouse clicks. Activity monitor shows both the AMPLibraryAgent and the Music app right around 100% CPU constantly. (the AMPLibraryAgent shows 100% cpu even when Music is not running).

I am a musician and have my own music that I try to upload into my Library and it typically takes many attempts and days just to add one song to my Cloud Music Library.

This is INCREDIBLY frustrating and Apple needs to fix this! I've tried contacting Apple Support and while they have been helpful recommending some of the things I've tried above, I still have no resolution.

Also the Music app process will show 100% CPU for awhile and then show (Not Responding) as if it had crashed, then if it sits there long enough will come out of the crash condition and again show 100% CPU.

Same here, it was working fine about 6 months ago; now on all my Macs its super glitchy and slow. I think Apple is just trying to get people to ditch MacOS for iOS when it comes to Apple Music. Surprisingly iTunes on Windows hasn't gotten worse, but not that it was any good before. I still prefer iTunes>Apple Music. That transition was horrible imo.

I've had this issue since upgrading to Catalina as well. I dread needing to update any music on any of my devices through Apple Music because it's so unreliable and glitchy. As I sit here typing this, Apple Music has been "Checking Music Library" for over 10 minutes.

It's embarrassingly bad.