Delete "All Songs" from Settings doesn't work (too many songs?)

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Delete "All Songs" from Settings doesn't work (too many songs?)

Background: I've collected music for decades and have a large (and 100% legal!) music library. Currently this is around 52K songs and 404GiB...Enough that my former 512MB iPhone 11 Pro was nearly full! I just bought a new 1TB iPhone 13 Pro so I could keep syncing my entire library to my phone without worrying about space.

After doing the automatic device-to-device migration and then syncing with my mac the on-device library seems to be in a terrible state — it seems like every song now has two copies and metadata like the album art is completely scrambled! In Settings→General→iPhone Storage it says Music is using 830GB and Settings→General→About is showing that it has 102222 songs which would be consistent with every song being somehow duplicated.

From what I understand the best thing to try next would be to completely empty the on-device library and then re-sync a fresh copy from my mac. Therefore I tried going to Settings→General→iPhone Storage→Music→EDIT→All Songs→Delete. As soon as I click on that red "Delete" button the Settings UI freezes. About 10-15 seconds later I am returned to the home screen meaning the Settings app crashed! As far as I can tell, no songs were actually deleted.

I wonder if there is just some limit to how many songs the deleter can process? In case it was just a resource limit I tried rebooting the phone but that did not help.

Each time I do this a JetsamEvent file is created in Analytics. It indicates a bug_type of 298 which I believe is an out-of-memory issue. However I don't see anything particularly noteworthy. As expected, Preferences is the frontmost app but it looks fine to me.. but possibly it has been given an artificial memory constraint by the system?

{
    "uuid" : "52a072ec-4764-39e9-beba-7891a36d715a",
    "states" : [
      "frontmost"
    ],
    "purgeable" : 21,
    "age" : 254798288,
    "fds" : 50,
    "coalition" : 439,
    "rpages" : 2043,
    "priority" : 10,
    "physicalPages" : {
      "internal" : [
        2060,
        0
      ]
    },
    "freeze_skip_reason:" : "none",
    "pid" : 273,
    "cpuTime" : 2.2346849999999998,
    "name" : "Preferences",
    "lifetimeMax" : 2965
  },

The process that Jetsam seems to actually kill is some random daemon process. In one case iconservicesagent, in another tccd, in a third bulletindistributord... Jetsam just seems to be picking a victim completely randomly.

I'm still going to keep poking, but if anyone has any suggestions of other ways to force a clean music re-sync with my mac I'd appreciate it.

The iPhone is, of course, brand new and running 15.0 (19A346). The Mac I am trying to re-sync with is up-to-date with OS/X 11.6

iPhone 13 Pro, iOS 15

Posted on Sep 30, 2021 7:46 PM

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MitchBlank Author

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8 points

Sep 30, 2021 9:05 PM in response to MitchBlank

UPDATE: I have succeeded in removing the music!

First I plugged the phone into the mac, disabled music syncing, and hit apply. This apparently removed the duplicates: the phone still had >50K songs on it, but it now had a few hundred free GB of storage.

Next I tried the ...→All Songs→Delete process again. Again the UI froze for ~10 seconds when I hit "Delete" but it did eventually complete without the Settings app crashing.

Now I am starting a re-sync of my music library which should complete in five hours or so. Hopefully then the Music app on the phone will be in a happy state again.

So there does seem to be some problem with Settings' ...→All Songs→Delete process. I suspect that the problem is that if it is given too much work to do (which might be only possible with a 1TB phone full of music) then it runs out of some resource. maybe one of the various Watchdog systems in iOS is unhappy with the Preferences app using so much uninterrupted CPU time trying to figure out what changes it needs to make?

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Delete "All Songs" from Settings doesn't work (too many songs?)

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