Apple Music issues after iOS 18 Update

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For whatever reason, iTunes has deleted loads of songs from albums on my Mac, which then correlates (transfers over) to my iPhone and iPad with iTunes Match, or whatever it's called these days. Manually syncing is no better for me either. If songs are not deleted, a huge portion of songs have been scattered all around my library. In other words, you pull up an album and only a few of the songs are in the album. The rest seem scattered around as individual songs with different album art. Apple can't even provide the correct album art anymore.

If I only had maybe 50 albums or so, I'd wipe everything and start over to try, but I have far more than that and I'm not about to "test" this only for it to be corrupted again. As it is, I have tried, to the best of my ability, to fix a small portion to no avail.

I have cancelled my iTunes match subscription which I've had for many years all, because of this mess now.

One of the most frustrating matters, is that it does not seem to affect everyone in the same way. Some people appear to have zero issues. Those that do, seem to have the same issues, but then many other's have different problems. With that, no one can even pinpoint what the issues are.

I'm looking for a home music server (Cocktail Audio?) now that I can rip my music directly into and then manually transfer from the server to my iPhone and iPad. It may be a hassle, but it's better than not having my music all at once where I want it as it currently is.

Merry Christmas to all of us from, Apple.......

Yes I have - it was a part of the "remedy" which didn't work, proposed by the Apple support operative I spoke to 2 days ago.

In fact, none of what she recommended I should do actually fixed the problem of half of my music having been 'de-downloaded' by installation of the first version of iOS 18.

I am now having to re-download all the missing music manually.

None of it ever left my library or playlists - just the downloads went missing.

The other weird thing is that when I re-download a tune, the Download option in the menu remains highlighted - in other words, it makes it seem like the re-download hasn't worked. Yet at the same time, the little grey circle with a white arrow is displayed alongside the track, which is normally a sign that it has downloaded.

Confusing, or what?!?

Such a wealthy company with unbelievable resources.....yet so sloppy, once it has your money

Yes Oldoiler - they removed my post. I can see they edited yours as well. I'm really not sure what I said wrong in my post that caused them to remove it - nor the previous post by Allezrider too.

All I really wanted to say is that whoever has a determination to attempt to get the company to fix stubborn issues should appeal via the Feedback page (easily found if you search for it via your favourite search engine). Reports collated via that page are actually taken into account, so there is more chance of a fix if everyone reports bugs etc in that manner.

Hope that helps. Also hope this post doesn't get deleted as well........

I’ve already tried I was on a month long support phone call with them in Sept where they were calling me multiple times weekly to do more steps and then having to send it to higher brass above a senior tech (whoever that would be) they ended up saying they had nothing else to try that they see in my diagnostics logs the issue but they have no fix and are working on it and basically that it would be fixed in a coming iOS update. Like I said this was in Sept/Oct and nothing is fixed yet and they are not addressing it with users for some reason. I don’t know how they expect to keep users this way. If I had not spent years cultivating my music library I would switch. I don’t know if I even believe they are working on it at this point.

I upgraded to 18.2.1 on an iPhone 16 Pro. What a huge mistake that I have been regretting every single day.

Songs that I've purchased take anywhere from 12 seconds to 30 seconds to start playing on long playlists (150 or more songs), which makes switching songs a pain as nothing will happen when the song is selected and then the song will start playing half a minute later. In addition, Star Ratings are not saved the first time I rate songs and I usually have to re-enter the ratings 3-4 times before they're saved. Both issues are incredibly annoying.

All my problems are in my phone Music app, my laptop Music app seems the same.

My problem started 5 days ago, Feb 10, 2025. iPhone automatic update on Monday to iOS 18.1 and the next day was unable to add a new album. Did a Sync in Finder window and went from 74,647 songs down to 10, one single album. I was on Sonoma still on laptop and tried multiple things to recover using different Sync options and then got to 1870 songs on the phone. Playlists seem to have been completely corrupted and when I deleted a newly detected playlist simply called Playlist, it deleted a different playlist with over 15,000 songs in it. That’s gone forever, thanks Apple. In discussion with Apple tech for two days, we tried another Sync method which got me to 60,000+ songs, most of which were greyed out on the phone app. I upgraded laptop to Sequoia last night and ran a Stnc again, now I have 67,000+ songs but behavior in the Play Banner still flashes through a dozen songs before stopping on desired song, but seems to be working. I had so many issues I can’t remember or list them all such as half of an album being out of Country or Region, so I’ll be exploring for more of those issues in the next couple days.

At this point, I think there has to be an alternative app to use to manage my own music and would love any ideas on that..!!!!!!!!!

Still experiencing same AirPlay and CarPlay problems since v 18. Has been over 2 months and at least (5) Apple Sr Tech service calls, including video / diagnostic log session. Core of the issue is Apple is redirecting technical resources (personnel, bandwidth…etc) to AI at the expense of ‘legacy’ streaming Apps (AirPlay, CarPlay).

It is manifested by shrinking the size of Album Artwork projection by 25-30% on AirPlay AND reduced Audio quality playback in CarPlay. This is a Business not technical decision.

Well I kept holding off installing 18.3 after 18.2 bricked my phone, but succumbed last week, in the hope things would improve. Fat chance! Music now crashes more often and sometimes the album cover image displayed isn’t the song that’s actually playing. A couple of times when that’s happened I’ve synced with iTunes on my laptop and the play count of the song that actually played increases, not the count of the song displayed, so at least it gets that right.

We are all ‘preaching to the choir’!

Apple has intentionally (business decision) redirected technical resources (staff and infrastructure) to AI at the expense of its ’Legacy’ products. Prime examples are: 1. Size reduction of Album artwork using AirPlay by about 30% 2. Audio Quality greatly reduced using CarPlay. Both involve ‘Streaming Technology’. I’ve been dealing with (4) different Apple Sr Tech Reps over past 2 months to no avail. I’ve also gone to Car Dealership (Asst Service Mgr) with issue and they CONFIRM many of their customers are complaining about CarPlay since v18. The technical problem could be masked by the bad ‘business’ decision.

I have also been experiencing an endless amount of buggy behavior from Apple Music starting in August '24 (after the Sonoma update)? Reported it to Apple customer service and through the feedback form, but the problems remain and only seem to be getting worse; songs played not registered, settings of a smart playlist not working, cannot remove playlists, cannot create play list, cannot rename playlists, the whole screen on my Mac going black when I move my cursor over it, and so on. Really frustrating. Why is Apple not fixing this???

I noticed after IOS 18 but it became more pronounced with 18.1. Playback from phone to USB headphones, Apple TV, and Car Play will glitch during song playback.

I can’t scroll through my long playlists on the Apple TV app. I have a few with several hundred songs, it seems that the more songs there are the harder it is for the app to scroll through them. Have restarted the unit several times. Between this and the zoom-outs at the end of movies, this thing’s days are numbered.

On top of that, when I was trying to add songs to playlists today it would add the wrong songs!

In my case if I play a song and then I block the iPhone the song stop and play again, even if I unblock the phone or sometimes the song stop many times and happens a lot since I update the phone to IOS 18 :/