Apple Music crashing after iMac Sequoia OS 15 update

Also experiencing this since I updated to Sequoia 15.2, and finally identified the conditions under which this happens:

If you drag and drop a song in a playlist, and that playlist is set to view "as Playlist" in the "View" settings, and the song you try to drag does not have an album title, then Apple Music main thread crashes with a swift::swift_dynamicCastFailure.

If you try to drag the same song with the "View" set to "as Songs", or any other view besides "as Playlist", then there is no crash.

If you edit the metadata of the song to have an album title, and then allow the playlist UI to refresh by clicking on the playlist in the sidebar again, and then attempt to drag the song, then the app will not crash.

In contrast, if you edit a song without an album title to have an album title, save, but do not allow the playlist UI to refresh (so that the UI is still not showing an album title), and then try drag the song, the app will crash.

This is reproducible every time.

This is a SwiftUI bug and has nothing to do with the specific of the song, or even the underlying metadata. The temporary workaround is to view your playlists "as Songs".

OS: macOS 15.2 (24C101)

Apple Music: 1.5.2

Everything you describe is reproducible on my end.

Thread 0 Crashed:: Music main Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
0   libsystem_kernel.dylib        	       0x191297720 __pthread_kill + 8
1   libsystem_pthread.dylib       	       0x1912cff70 pthread_kill + 288
2   libsystem_c.dylib             	       0x1911dc908 abort + 128
3   libswiftCore.dylib            	       0x1a244046c swift::fatalErrorv(unsigned int, char const*, char*) + 136
4   libswiftCore.dylib            	       0x1a244048c swift::fatalError(unsigned int, char const*, ...) + 32
5   libswiftCore.dylib            	       0x1a2433de4 swift::swift_dynamicCastFailure(void const*, char const*, void const*, char const*,

... plus 850 more line of stack trace and reporting.

The two fixes you mentioned work. I can view the playlist "as Songs" OR add an album title to a song without one when viewed "as Playlist".

In my original post, I wondered why this only happens to one large frequently used playlist and I observed a detail. Create a new playlist with File -> new -> playlist and name it. Put a couple songs in it and the playlist UI will have a row for Song, Artist, Album, and Time at the top.

I can move songs around in ANY playlist, with or without an album title in the meta data, that has these four columns. My playlist in question does not have the "Album" column.

I can only move songs around in this playlist that have an album title OR I have to view "as Songs". To get around this. I created a new playlist and added all the songs to it. No good. I've identified three songs that, when added to this list, remove the "Album" column from this new playlist. When I add any of these three songs to another playlist, they do not have any effect on the "Album" column. My new playlist is 600 minus those 3 songs and works as intended. Yes this took a while as I transferred them in small groups. Still digging but this seems like a Swift UI issue like you mentioned. The three songs in question all have title, artist and album titles.

Is your music on an external drive?

There seems to be a problem with indexing a particular drive. This is noted by

• spotlightknowledged - High CPU Use - Responsible for indexing files on your drives
• media-indexer - High CPU Use - Specifically for indexing media files like Music.
• suggestd - High CPU Use - Processes the info gained from the indexed files

I would start by eliminating the Hub and all external devices to see if it resolves the problems, then start adding drives directly connected to the Mac. This is one source of a Kernel Panic problems and why it says it may be Hardware related. See if it makes a difference when you add the Hub to the mix. Many times the Hub has been identified as the source of the problem. I assume your Hub is self powered, as there may not be enough power provided by USB. If you are able to identify an external device causing the problem, then steps may be taken to resolve it.

I would also experiment with Rebuilding the Spotlight Index and excluding some of the drives to see if there is a particular drive that is not allowing Spotlight to successfully index the files. It will take some time to let Spotlight finish the index.

Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support

As for software, you look pretty good. The one thing that stands out related to the indexing of the files is the Adobe Content Synchronizer Finder Extension. Not sure if you are actively using Adobe Acrobat or if it was installed for another reason. The one kernel panic started on 9/18 when Adobe Acrobat was installed for the second time. I have no specific information about a compatibility problem with Sequoia so I can't call out that specific app, but if you want to test with Adobe installed start by using the uninstaller, then make sure these files/folder have also been removed:

• Applications/Utilities/Adobe Sync
• /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.adobe.ARMDC.Communicator.plist
• /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.adobe.ARMDC.SMJobBlessHelper.plist
• /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.adobe.acc.installer.v2.plist
• /Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe.ARMDCHelper.cc24aef4a1b90ed56a725c38014c95072f92651fb65e1bf9c8e43c37a23d420d.plist
• /Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe.AdobeCreativeCloud.plist
• /Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe.ccxprocess.plist

All those files are running on startup to support Adobe. You can find these files by going to Finder > Go > Go to Folder, then enter the first part of the location like /Library/LaunchDaemons or /Library/LaunchAgents, and you will see those files there.

I can confirm that the bug is still present in 15.3 and remains quite reproducible; Music will crash when I attempt to drag a song with "Unknown Album" property into another playlist. Such media will be probably be present in the Music tree under "Unknown Artist".

An effective workaround is to select all songs in the playlist and assign an Album name (likely related to the playlist name :)). Songs may then be dragged to another playlist and the media file will be moved to a newly created directory in the tree.

I found no anomalies in exported playlists, file names and media file metadata (Unix stat(1) command).

Apple seems to be enamoured with AI these days (I turned it off). Perhaps their AI may help them to do elementary QA in regression testing and debugging. Then again, perhaps it may not ...

Music: 15.2.56

OS: 15.3

Darwin Kernel Version 24.3.0: Thu Jan 2 20:24:06 PST 2025; root:xnu-11215.81.4~3/RELEASE_ARM64_T8103 arm64

Edontso13 wrote:

This exact situation is affecting me as well. Music crashes every time I drag a track to another position. I hope an Apple solution can move this narrative forward, sooner than later.

I can confirm that for me on Sequoia, that I can move tracks across many different playlists, so it would not be a system wide bug that affects every user. There may be a third party app that is interfering with the normal operation of the OS and is installed to launch on startup. These could be a syncing service such as OneDrive or DropBox that is corrupting the music file when it is trying to sync or CleanMyMac which is known to crash apps. For more details on what is installed on your computer that could be causing the problem, post the free EtreCheck report. It contains no personal information, but will show system processes launching on startup and give more details about crash reports that may identify the problem.

How to use the Add Text Feature When Post… - Apple Community

For the users who have experienced this it was due to the song not having an Album associated with it. Is that the case for you? If it is, then it would appear to be a bug, but until it is resolved, you can add anything in the album field to prevent the crash. I haven't had a crash in Music on Sequoia, but all of my songs to have an album listed for each song.

Hey guys,

Music crashed by my MacBook Air 2020 (M1) also. Today i updated to 15.1.1 and the songs i couldn't drag'n'drop to another playlist's now workin!! You should update to 15.1.1

Cheers,

Steffen

I can confirm that songs that were crashing Music didn’t have an album name. When I added one I could move the song and not crash Music.

After you are able to provide a simple reproducible use case, please send feedback to Apple here:

Feedback - Apple Music - Apple

It could very well be a bug that occurs when there is no Album attached to a Song. I could see where that would be missed when testing as every song in my Music Library has an Album, but obviously it is not required.

I'm having the same problem. It started with the Sequoia update. Sequoia 15.1 (I think) solved the problem. Meanwhile, I got a new Macbook Pro at the end of November. When I did the Sequioa 15.2 update the problem started all over again on my new Macbook. This is very frustrating becasue I use spoken word recordings all day every day I work with clients. It's also frustrating that the problem got fixed after an update and now is a problem again. I went through and got rid of potential softward that could interfere with Music. It was only the update that fixed it. Apple broke it, fixed it and broke it again or so it appears.

I have been experiencing this issue since upgrading to Sequoia. I'm now on Sequoia 15.3 and it is still an issue. I've noticed that it affects songs that were not purchased through the iTunes store more often than songs that were. The issue is only observed when trying to rearrange songs in one large, frequently used playlist in my library with a click and drag. I can move purchased music *sometimes* but can not move imported mp3 files at all. It always results in a crash and close. Possibly an indexing issue?