Apple Music gapless playback not working in iOS 17

For several months now, going back at least to iOS 16.5, gapless playback is not working in the Music app on my iPhone. This goes for my iPhone XS this summer and now iPhone 15 Pro. I was hoping iOS 17 would fix the problem, but it remains. I mainly have my own personal (ripped from CD) mp3s synched to my phone, but it's also disappeared when streaming from Apple Music (for example, Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd). This is very annoying when listening to albums designed to flow continuously (Abbey Road, various Pink Floyd albums, live albums, etc.). Gapless playback on iTunes on my PC works fine; it's the Music app on my iPhone that's the problem. I reported this to Apple a few weeks ago, but iOS 17.0.3 still has the issue. Does anyone know if Apple is working to fix this? It's getting kind of ridiculous that several iOS updates have come out in the past few months but the problem still exists. In the meantime, are there any solutions or workarounds that anyone has come across?


[Re-Titled by Moderator]

iPhone 15 Pro

Posted on Oct 11, 2023 9:32 AM

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Posted on Mar 10, 2024 2:39 PM

I found a workaround. If you check "convert to (any bitrate) AAC if higher" in the general tab on sync settings, the converted music will have gapless playback as expected.

A couple gotchas:

  • Since the conversion creates brand new files, all of your music will have to be synced again with your iPhone. This can be a pretty lengthy process depending on how large your music library is (it took me a bit over three hours to resync 62 GBs of music)
  • The highest possible bitrate you can convert to is 256 kbps, keep that in mind if the loss in quality might bother you
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Apple Music gapless playback not working in iOS 17

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