Alarm Music Issue Persists even in Newest iOS 17.3.1
It should be a simple bug fix but as Apple is constantly slower to produce results and only produce vague answers. I’ll better explain a solution that is rather annoying that we as the consumer need to do but will work.
After reading over the forums on here I can see that Apple has still fallen short of a straight up answer for the problems surrounding music not playing as your alarm when being used in the default Clock app.
The overwhelming problem is with the Lossless feature in Apple Music likely due to its codex not being compatible with some apps in playing the music.
Best solution for consumers:
The desired music will have to be only downloaded in High seemingly.
Some forums have gone through a long convo on having to remove the download and redownload songs to make it work. The short answer is YES you will have to do this for each song you wish to use as an alarm if you want to preserve the majority of your downloads in Lossless and target only certain ones to be you dedicated alarm song. Or you can try my approach which is far more user friendly and less time consuming for those of us who are truly too busy to have to remember we have to go through these steps every time we want to use a song for an alarm.
*As a disclaimer unless you are an audiophile and music is your life you are not going to hear much of a difference and as an added bonus it consumes far less storage space on the phone; so more song availability when offline.
- In Apple Music find any song you wish to use as your alarm music:
2. Tap the Lossless icon:
3. This pop up menu will appear. Select Audio Quality Settings:
4. On the Audio Quality menu select Downloads and select High Quality:
5. When you get here you will be prompted with a choice, to Replace all Lossless audio downloads or to Keep Lossless. (Here is the part I was speaking of with saving time and if you aren’t an audiophile it won’t make a difference to you.)
* if you click Replace it will replace ALL current Downloads and make future Downloads in High quality only.
*if you click Keep Lossless, afterwards you will have to go through each individual and currently Lossless song, delete them and redownload them so they will now be High Quality. Then you will have to go back to the Audio Quality Menu in your setting app under iTunes after and turn on Lossless in the Download section again. This will preserve you High quality download for the alarm song but you general future download will be in Lossless. Just remember any time you want to use a different song as an alarm you’ll have to go through this process every time to get it to work.
Hope this helps all those who are having this frustrating seemingly dumb problem.
Too Apple:
It would be greatly appreciated if you’d get this issue worked out; at the very least with the default clock app that comes with the phone out of the box. This way steps would be far more streamline and back to normal for most than they currently are.
Thank you to all who help in this matter