Apple Music is SO SLOW

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 music app is a disaster - one thing I’ve noticed is one should unplug their iPhone from computer while using Music app -

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.

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!

Just to add to that. I think it is a general problem, I have 2 MacBook Pros at home and an iMac at office, Apple Music is so slow. It is just a bad design which does not have to do with anything Apple does.

Loading is super slow, searching takes forever and the whole transition between artists, albums, library is buggy and slow.

I feel too sad because I would like to use it to be able to ask Siri to play music but I think Spotify is simply still a better app.

Yeah I have this same concern with Apple Music. I'm running maOS Catalina on good hardware over a solid internet connection.

The UI of Apple Music on desktop isn't very snappy compared to Spotify. It's pretty annoying. Even doing a basic side-by-side with Spotify shows that Apple Music is the slower one. For example artist results are loaded by Spotify faster than Apple Music. The iOS version of Apple Music has always been solid for me, but not on desktop.

I have completely rebuilt my library from scratch. Took a week but now Music loads in under two minutes (down from 10+) So I guess I'm happy? I have a ridiculously large library. Someone should make a pro version of a music library. Something that just deals with music you already own. I don't need the ******** "songs of the week" nonsense. I just want to find something in my library ASAP.

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.

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 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.

I spent over four hours chatting and talking on the phone with them, this morning. I got nowhere. They act like they've never heard of this problem. We all know it's Catalina, right? I have two Macs and it's the same with both. My iOS devices are fine. My problem is searching: it's either very slow or doesn't work at all. Sometimes it works fine. And I also have trouble adding songs to playlists—I'll get an error message and it adds the song anyway or I'll get an error message and it does nothing. I like to manage my music library on a Mac, but I have to resort to typing on my tiny iPod just to search for and to add songs! This really *****!

I just upgraded to Catalina yesterday. I was putting it off as I have a 30,000 song sized, lovingly curated library of music and I heard Apple Music wasn't really cutting it. Anyway as I wanted the Catalina upgrade with new features & security updates I bit the bullet yesterday and upgraded and............ Apple Music is basically unusable, honestly it is not fit for purpose.

I get the spinning wheel of death every time I try to do something, for instance scrolling down my playlists, it takes 30 seconds to switch between my library and Apple Music and 10 seconds to drag an MP3 onto the desktop. It's like a student programming

project gone wrong. I have loved Apple for a long time but how can a company with so much money and resources, much of it made from revolutionising the music experience, not be able to develop a music app properly?

If you have a decent collection and a load of playlists then it's essentially worthless. Apple Music on mobile is fine by all accounts (I don't have it) but on desktop, it is an utter shambles :( Check the Apple Music group on Reddit for further confirmation. If anyone has any fixes or a way to roll back to iTunes whilst using Catalina I will be eternally grateful. I've searched online and there's not even many references to the desktop app's unusability. Now I'm starting to wonder if this is just me or is everyone else just using their mobile?

Same problem here, and across all my Apple devices: iPhone 11 Pro, Apple TV and MacBook Pro.

In general content loads slowly when switching between sections For You, Browse, Radio etc.. (text, artworks and music). Sometimes it takes good 15 to 30 seconds for a song to start and sometimes when skipping songs fast application crashes.

It feels like Apple Music works over 56kbps telephone modem connection :), yet my internet connection is over 100MBits....

This is actually in general problem with all Apple services related products including using iCloud (e-mail, photos, contacts) via web browser, and News+ also across all devices... content simply loads too slowly.

In contrast Spotify loads all the content quickly and everything works seamlessly. Skipping songs does not result in buffering. Next song starts immediately.

I live in Europe, and i have experienced this problem too. it does not matter if i use fast pc or iPhone 11 Pro Max, problem still is noticable. every time i choose song or radio episode it take few seconds, maybe 15 to load, in comparition Youtube, Spotify, Soundcloud load instantly. It's annoying because Apple Music is premium service with monthly fee.