Remove songs from playlist but not library

I spent at minimum five hours on the phone with four different media services specialists. The last person I spoke to had the audacity to tell me that the songs are just lost and I wasn’t getting my money back. I thought when you purchased goods, it’s yours.

There is no way to recover the songs that were deleted from the playlist bug, unless you have your phone backed up on a computer and you restore it from there (who does that since cloud computing!?!). Really Apple??

Perhaps Apple should come out with a flip phone, with a rotary dial next. Let’s just get rid of all the technology advances and go back 20 or 30 years while we’re at it.

I never had this problem with my CD’s. Oh! And my 8 track!

This issue is causing havoc - I've lost so many songs and there are some albums with songs missing and I don't realize they are missing until I need to use them for my job. Why would they even make that an option ? Just another way to make everyone frustrated. I'm avoiding the updates on my other devices because of this issue. Apple could you change it back ! you've destroyed my music!

Hi! I had the same problem. iPhone 12, latest software update, and Apple Music subscription. I couldn’t remove songs from my playlist without it deleting, but I found a solution. Hit “edit” under the menu in the top right corner and then you can use the red circle or swipe left to remove a song from your playlist without removing it from your library. Hope this helps!

Okay, on iOS you can go to the iTunes Store app. Scroll way down to the bottom and click on your Apple ID. Then once you authenticate with Face ID or Touch ID you will see a menu. One of the options is “Hidden Purchases” and under that menu you will see all of the music you purchased that is not visible in your library. You can unhide them by clicking the cloud download icon or just click “Unhide All.” Hope it works for you!

Sorry you didn’t have any luck trying that. I would message Apple Support at this point because I’m out of solutions. They’ve helped me with Apple Music problems before. Sorry I couldn’t be more help!

I have no idea how to get these songs back or even begin to identify which songs were deleted. Infuriating. Anyone have any idea?

M5328 wrote:

I have no idea how to get these songs back now. When I go into the iTunes Store the affected songs show as “purchased” if I search for them in the store, but they don’t show under my purchased song list in the “more” section. I have no idea how to get these songs back or even begin to identify which songs were deleted. Infuriating. Anyone have any idea?

I don't know if you already found your answer, but I just went through a similar experience. It's really annoying that a simple swipe operation can seemingly nuke your purchased music.

The (hopefully good) news is that it may not be that bad after all. If you have iTunes on a PC or Mac try navigating to Account > View My Account...

Then scroll down to where it says Downloads and Purchases. Hit the Manage link that should be to the right. If all's well and good, you should see your missing music. Click the Unhide buttons to restore them.

Honestly, this whole thing is a lesson in bad UI and UX design. And it could at least, in part, be negated by changing the wording of the delete action to better represent what it's doing. Of course, that would require more coding and distinguishing purchased music. Far easier for everyone if Apple simply put the drastic Delete action behind the Three Dot menu and have the swipe action perform a context friendly action > remove from playlists within playlists, remove from device otherwise.

And for the love of my sanity, they could at least add a "Disable Delete from library" option if they can't be bothered to change the wording of its functionality to match the different use cases!

This is unbelievable!! a simple edit of a play list should be so hard???? delete a song form the play list not from the whole **** library and have to re-add it??? You have to be kidding me. OR I should recreate a 60 song play list simply because I want to make a SMALL change??? I assume it is possible by clicking this then that then a drop down then high lite then swipe then then then then and you're done. Come on a play list is an organic thing. Add songs move them around, remove them and add new ones!! Who designs your apps, who decides what features need to be easy to access?? Itunes was easy to edit play list, apple music not so much!!

It’s a new promotion from Apple. Ruin everyone’s playlists permanently. And even better, if you’re as unlucky as I was you can also permanently delete songs from your library with no way to recover them.

As a BIG thank you to Apple, I signed up with Spotify. This just shows how little they care about their customers. No official response from Apple as of yet.

Absolute nightmare. I want to use this app but updates like this are so horrifyingly inept. Just realized I deleted a lot of cherished songs thinking that I could casually make a playlist for my little brother. Guess not!

Thought I was doing something stupid, but no, lots of other people are having the same problem.

I created a big playlist - on my iPhone, realised it was too big removed a bunch of songs, probably about 50.

Later realised these had been deleted from the iPhone.

When viewing the music on my device through iTunes on my PC, the songs still show as being present, but when you click on one, it can't be played, because it is no longer on the iPhone, and a little exclamation mark in a circle comes up alongside the song. I then have to delete the song from the iPhone (even though it already isn't there), then copy it back from the PC to the iPhone.

My songs are not purchases, I am old school, I buy CDs, then add them to iTunes and copy them to the iPhone. It is taking ages to go back through my playlist - by memory - to work out what I added and then removed.

Thanks Apple for your total balls-up. Please change this functionality back.

If anyone knows a way to identify the missing songs, it would really help.

Yes! Gristy1984! SO very true!!! Apple needs to bring back the ability to remove songs easily from a specific playlist and NOT delete them from your library!!! I have some purchased music but since I subscribed to Apple Music I no longer purchase songs but now just add them to playlists. As long as I have my Apple Music subscription I’ll have access to my songs/music. But I digress. Apple, just like so many other companies/corporations, just feels the need to keep “tinkering” w their software and unfortunately for us, their customers, they end up not improving these processes at all and, instead, they make it SOooo much harder to do just the simplest thing! Apple is one of the WORST for making things way more complicated than they need to be!!! It all makes me question what is their underlying purpose in all this? Will it make them more money? Or are they just trying to give their employees something to do and keep them employed?!!! Like by trying to come up w all these half-wit, hair-brained, idiotic new schemes and ideas. As for us customers we have ENOUGH complications in our lives and we would very much appreciate Apple not changing things up for the worse under the pretense of improving something!!!

I have this exact same problem. I just realized today that Ive deleted a dozen or so songs without realizing and I’m the most mad I’ve been in a while. I can’t remember what the songs were called and couldn’t even begin to remember or know when I had them all back

Thank you!! This solved the problem!!

I did not realize how much music I’d actually “deleted” until I looked at the hidden list.

Apple should be ashamed of this!

it smells like they’re trying to drive everyone to rent music from them instead of own it!

Thank-you! This “issue” was driving me crazy! LOL. And I really hope more people see your response 👍👍

P.S. It seems like the way to change names of playlists is also different compared to how it was before (or maybe not). Anyway, you need to also hit the same edit button after hitting the 3 dots, and then just bring the red “curser” down to the playlist title and change it like this.