Apple Music issues after iOS 18 Update

Running 18.1 and it's been happening since 18. Glad it's not only me. Apple Music plays for a few seconds then stops. Repeatedly. Sometimes it'll play fine, but other times, it's useless. I notice that it also happens when I have my AirPod Pro 2 in. Not sure if it's happening anyway, but it's getting to be not much fun listening to ANYTHING because of the constant freezing and interruptions.

I did and it didn't do one single thing to help. In fact, it seems to have made even more songs grayed out with the message, "This item is not currently available in your country or region.", in addition to all of the other screwups it has caused. Heck, itunes won't even update the album art on my iphone or ipad, if it can even find it in it's own music vaults which practically contain every song written since the beginning of mankind.

I'm getting close to just deleting the entire library. The fact that it controls my music; the music that I OWN and tells me that it is not available is infuriating beyond words. I have already wasted WAY too much time trying to repair my itunes library.

Knowing that my itunes library is not complete on my iphone and ipad makes me not even want to use them anymore to play music, simply from the fact that, it's NOT ALL there.

This same thing happened to me years ago with an ios update and I don't recall what the fix was at the time, but I don't recall it being anywhere as bad as 18.XXX.

Good luck

Its terrible. Now it orders The albums by year…. But only Give you The option of going through the most recent one to the oldest one, destroying the “reading” order and the flow of evolution in The artist career.

18.1.1 installed a couple of days ago, no change, I still have the same issues. Nowhere near as bad as some of the people commenting on here.

Maybe I’m one of the lucky ones, slow starts and occasional crashes are an annoyance, but at least it plays everything and no songs have gone missing or not played due to Region.

So last night I deleted about six albums (there are far more, but I tried with six) that itunes had "done its work on", ie. screwed them up. I reburned those same albums to my iMac M1. Everything is good on the Mac.

However, they show up on my iphone with double the songs again, but this time the duplicated song is grayed out and gives me the message that "this song is not currently available in your country or region." With that being said, some albums through itunes match transferred over fine with no duplicates or grayed out songs, but some albums have the entire song listing grayed out with the same message about them not being available. Same with my ipad Pro.

This is all on 18.1.1. I just can't begin to express my frustration with this.

I'm not about to delete my entire library and try and reburn around 1000 albums only to "see if it works". As I've stated before, I'm going to seriously look for an audiophile music server/streamer that I can rip my CD's to; hopefully one that I can then transfer the songs over to my iphone and ipad and never look back to itunes again.

As others have said, Apple's silence is deafening.

I completely turned iTunes music sharing off on my iphone and iMac M1 and decided to sync manually the old fashioned way. I thought for sure that this would resolve the problem and at least sync everything up correctly, albeit in a less convenient way.

Nope, didn't happen. It's just as bad if not worse than before. I've done hard restarts of the phone and Mac, re-synced multiple times and it's different each time in the library on my phone, but totally messed up.

I would say around 30% - 40% of my music, if not more, is now unusable on my iphone and ipad.

I'm done.

Happy Holidays, Everybody

I am also having issues with my Apple Music on iOS 18.1.1. When I click on the … next to a song that I search and open up the menu, I am only given the option to “Add to a Playlist” and am no longer getting “Add to Device”

When I click on “Add to a Playlist” the menu just minimizes and the list of my playlists does not pop up.

This is super annoying and I really hope they come out with a fix soon!!

My fiancé and I have both been experiencing all issues described above, and more.

• crashes when editing playlists
• crashes after playing 3-6 songs
• audio quality dropped
• refreshing the app doesn’t fix the issue
• I have just uninstalled and reinstalled seemed to make the app slower tbh

As someone else has stated in this thread… billing for Apple Music works just fine. They got my money for this month.

I’ve been thinking about moving to Spotify as most of my friends use it and the social media aspect of Spotify is better.

Maybe this is my 13th reason to jump from the Apple Music platform.

ethanku wrote:

Navigating through your music is way more slow and laggy. One thing that also really annoys me - since the update, if you select a song to play next, you can't move it into a group of songs that is already playing. I would just let playlists or all my songs play on random, then think of a song I wanted to hear, then see a song coming up I wanted to hear it next to and move it there. Now you can't do that - if I select "Play next," I can add other songs to also play next, but I can't move them into the set of songs that are already playing, and I can't move anything up from the songs that are coming up to be next to the songs I want to play next. A small thing but really annoying - why take away functionality that was nice to have?

Have you updated to iOS 18.2? It was just released.

It's terrible. I noticed only the other day that much of my downloaded music on Apple Music on my iPhone is no longer downloaded - but it's in the library and in playlists. This seems to have happened to a random selection of tunes, since the iOS 18 update.

Connecting with Apple support technicians didn't do much good - most of the them couldn't diagnose or remedy the problem. The most 'senior' and supposedly capable of the 3 technicians I spoke to (on 2 calls lasting 2 hours) blamed my VPN app!! She also advised me incorrectly on other aspects of the issue. They clearly don't know what's going on.

I have around 6000 tunes on Apple Music on my 'phone - and manually re-downloading all the tunes that their system removed is going to take ages. Also, irritatingly, once I have pressed the download button and see the white arrow in a grey circle alongside the track name.....the option to download is still there, possibly indicating there is a problem or....what? So in some cases I have had to press 'download' several times.

These silly malfunctions are so time consuming - and lost/wasted time is the one thing that Apple can't restore to its customers.

i recently had issues with the songs in my library kept repeating after every 4-5 songs. So I got on to apple and thought I got it sorted but no. Now repeats the same loop after 20 or so songs. 🙄

now the latest thing I’ve noticed is this. I was on a flight recently and put my phone on airplane mode. I set my self to play my music with my headphones and decided to play from a playlist within my library. It wouldn’t allow me to - said I need to be connected to WiFi or mobile data. So checked before flight took off. No problems playing on mobile data but as soon as I switched to airplane mode then I wouldn’t allow me to. So I played songs from my main library and I wouldn’t shuffle. It would allow me to skip but not shuffle.

i think the basic fact is apple wants everyone subscribed to Apple Music( which I’m not) and are pushing people in that direction by hook or by crook.

Something else I’ve noticed since 18.2 is that occasionally volume will increase or decrease when I pick up my phone to use it. Last night volume went down so low that I had to turn it up to max to be able to hear my music, then when the next song started to play it gradually got louder and louder and I had to keep reducing the volume. And my battery is draining faster since 18.2 than after 18.1

Not music related, but this “sorting” of emails is a pile of doggy do! Emails aren’t displayed, go missing, it can take ages to check and download (8 minutes yesterday, I timed it). But the emails are still there when I check on my laptop, it’s just my phone won’t display them. Maybe they don’t match the criteria for the categories Apple have decided on? I’ve turned off that new “feature” but some are still not being displayed.

I’ve just seen there’s a new update available - 18.2.1 - I’ll install it and see what it does, because whatever happens it can’t be worse. Can it?

I updated to the latest IOS update for both iphone and ipad yesterday. It made no difference. Nothing worse, but nothing any better.

I think I may have stated here before that I have tried loading new (ripping new CD's) into Music to no avail. They will show up, but they still show up with double the songs where I still have to go in and delete the duplicates. This is not OK. In addition, each time I seem to try and trouble shoot issues, other issues crop up that affect the majority of the rest of the music. Songs will duplicate again, "Recently Added" music does not show up in the correct order (yes I know how to sort it as well) and on and on.

I currently have several brands of music streamers narrowed down that I am interested in to replace Apple's Music "ecosystem". It won't be as convenient as Apple (when Apple worked) but at least I won't (I hope not) be going through all of this mess again. Everyone's time is important to them. I don't really care if Apple gets this fixed now, because I've been through this issue before with regarding this matter (several years ago, although, not as severe as this time) and I'm not going to sit around waiting for it to happen again if a software update were to fix it this time, because I know it will happen again.

This has to be an issue that is much deeper, because not every Apple user experiences it and for those that do, the issues seem to be very different for each user. What about people that are buying new Apple products today and get home and they work. What is different about them with the current software as opposed to those of us on this forum where Apple's music DOES NOT work........

Long winded rant here. Sorry, but Cheers everyone!

[Edited by Moderator]

The ‘Quality’ of Video (Album Art) and Audio music playback has deteriorated noticeably since V 18… etc. Specifically, Album Artwork now appears much smaller on screen in ‘AirPlay’ mode. Also, the Audio quality has deteriorated noticeably in CarPlay mode.

My library is a mess. What was once one album is now 3-6 albums, the songs have divided up into different albums. On my iPad as well. My computer is fine. And it's solo artists as well as soundtracks. I went to a genius bar was told the only way to fix it was to delete the songs from my phone and then redownload them from my computer. Didn't work, I got the songs back but they are still divided.

And I am not paying for apple music, I have had these songs before there was an AppleMusic and see no reason to pay for something that wasn't broken before the update.