Apple Music Does Not Pick Up Where It Left Off

This issue is getting worse. As javalinga suggested, I deleted and redownloaded the music file it kept wanting to go to, and also deleted and re-set the entire playlist again in the Apple Music library. Now every time I open the Apple Music app, the player just says "Not Playing". (It used to show the title of the song where it left off.) If I just hit the Play button, it randomly selects a song to start playing (even though I have random shuffle mode turned off). It seems that it loses its memory whenever the app is shut down or my iPhone is turned off at night. If I can remember what song was playing and I call up the song from the library manually, it picks up where the song had left off. But it won't go to the song on its own. I have to remember the song myself, search the playlist, and manually tap on the song title to get it to pick up where it left off. This is getting REALLY frustrating. This app was always very reliable up until a few weeks ago when this started happening. How do I get it back to being hassle-free???

I called and spoke with someone in Apple Music's tech department last week about this. He checked a bunch of my settings and said everything was set correctly. He said he'd check with his engineering folks and see what they could find. He called back the next day to say that, yes, they have uncovered a bug in their latest update that causes Apple Music to lose track of what song played last if you shut down your phone or close the app. He asked them to revert to the previous version until they could fix this bug, but the engineers said they could not do that because the previous version had other bugs that they did not want to reintroduce into customer's devices. They said they would work on this and hopefully have it corrected with their next update. But he had no idea how long that was going to take. So in the meantime, we just have to live with this ridiculous issue. You would think after so many years of designing music players, Apple would be able to figure out how to let songs pick up where they left off! I guess not.

By the way, the only Mickey Mouse work-around I've come up with for this issue is to check what song or podcast segment I'm on before pausing the playback. I then open my Notes app and type in the song title or podcast chapter. Before I start my playlist again the next day, I check the Notes app. I then go to my library and scroll down my playlist to get to the song where I left off and select it manually to resume the playlist. Oddly, I've discovered that the song or segment will pick up exactly where it left off if you do it this way. But you need to find the tune or segment and select it manually to have it pick up where you left off.

Yeah, I've been mostly listening to Spotify now until they get this bug fixed. I'm really surprised there isn't more of an uproar from Apple Music users about this. What good is a music app that can't remember the last song played on the playlist??!!