iPhone music distorted after upgrading to iOS5

@ Pipe Ramos

Check your songs start and stop times, might be issue.

@ Pipe

Any solution to try.

Check your bit rate of the music files.

Seems iOS5 has issues with music files that are encode higher than 128kbps. Just doesn't seem to want to play.

See if that helps, let's us know either way.

I have noticed the same problem since upgraded to iOS 5. Nothing to do with Equalizer/Volume settings/Sound Check as these are switched off on my Iphone4 - in iOS4 and iOS5.

I had listened to the same song just before the iOS5 upgrade, and then immediately after the upgrade an hour later. Huge difference!! Songs in iOS5 are now more bassy (but the bad kind). Very disappointed.

In some songs, the increased bass results in horrible distortion and made headphones crackly.

I understand this happens if you are using expensive head/ear phones - someone in Apple has boosted up the Bass setting in iOS 5 in order to make cheaper earphones sounds "better" but unfortunately has a detrimental effect on high-performance headphones (like the £250 Bowers and Wilkins P5).

For more than a year, my songs sounded perfect/natural on iOS4 with Bowers and Wilkins P5, without any need for EQ/Soundcheck....and now iOS5 has destroyed the audio quality.

I hope Apple will restore the music quality in iOS5. Please Apple - return the dB+ settings to their proper levels. Test them with good quality headphones sold in your stores!

Glad that it's working out for you. Let us know if anything changes.

Hi Will-T

Appreciate you're only trying to help but, sorry, that's not a good enough solution. It will cost me money to get to a Genius Bar, the nearest one is over 20 miles away, and it will cost me money to exchange my iPhone. It worked fine before the upgrade, it doesn't now and looking on these forums and all over the Internet this is not just a problem for me - this is a fault in the update and it is up to Apple to resolve it.

Cheers, Stu ...

No worries Stu

Some people have managed to downgrade their OS, wouldn't normally recommend it as "Apple" doesn't support this.

Here's a link I found

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3324858?answerId=16152816022#16152816022

Hi there.

I have the exact same problem, ever since I 'upgraded' my iPod Touch to iOS5 the other day the sound has been atrocious. I thought it was the headphones at first but everything sounds perfectly fine through my computer so I know the iPod is at fault.

You're going to need to fix this, and fix it fast. 😟

Will T

In fact every song that doesn´t play is igher than 128 kbps

Thank you very much

is there any solution for this problem or i have to wait any upgrade ??

Thanks again

Pipe R

I have exactly the same problem on both my iPhone 4 and my iPad after upgrading to iOS5. I can't listen to any music on them, because of the distortion. I don't use any equalisers or bass boosting. I have done a full reload on my iPad to no avail.

If I stream to my iPad using home sharing from my iMac, I don't seem to have this problem and I don't have it when I listen to music streamed from my iMac via the apple tv2 to my hi-Fi.

This problem was not there before I upgraded to iOS5. Very disappointing. I used to listen to music a lot on both devices but now I have stopped. Are they not meant for playing music on!!!!!

Hey All,

So I have been thinking about this one, trying to figure out why some folks have the issue and others do not. So here are some questions that might help us figure out what is going on:

1. Do you use Sound Check? Lots of people seem to indicate that adjusting this fixes the issue. Does it fix it for you?
2. Do you use Optional Volume per track? You set optional volume for specific tracks in iTunes. To see what it is set at, you right click on the track, select get info, then go to options. The normal setting for volume adjustment is zero. If you have it set to something else, try setting it to zero and see if that fixes it.
3. Do you use EQ settings? If so, which ones? When you change EQ settings, does this help or even eliminate the problem?
4. If you do use EQ settings, did you have your optional volume set to anything other than 0% before you updated? Did you have Soundcheck on before the update? Did you have both on before you updated?
5. If volume adjustment was at 0% before the update, did it change to something other than 0% after the update?
6. Did you have an EQ set before the update? If so, which one?
7. Are the tracks that have a problem from iTunes?
8. If you turn off all EQ, set volume offset to 0% for each song, restore your device and then resync the problem songs, does it fix the issue?
9. What operating system are you using for the upgrade process?
10. Which iOS product are you using? Touch? Phone? Which gen of these?
11. Do you know what version of iOS you had when you updated?
12. Do you know which version of iTunes you had before the update?
13. Are you using any non-Apple software that is supposed to improve your sound levels?
14. If you change the volume level does the sound quality improve, get worse or stay the same?

I upgraded my iPhone 4 to iOS5 and I don't see this issue at all. I have tried to make it happen by fooling with some of the settings I mentioned in the list. I know there is a whole lot there, but it might just help those of us in the community to figure this out with this information.

i

Hey!! I've got the solution.

this is some what a format problem.

if you see a aac file, it's not all the same aac format. there are, aac low complexity VBR, aac low complexity CBR, aac high-efficiency. the files are being corrupted are the aac high-efficiency. make sure you don't convert your file using aac HE or high-efficiency.

to check if it's HE,

in itunes left click on a song and click "get info", go to "summary tab and it will appear on the right upper corner..

you'll have to delete the files with HE on the ios device, convert the original files to low complexity then load it again to your ios device.

I don't know why it sounds wrong only on iOS 5 though...

hope it helps!!

Guys this fixed the problem for me, first of all the problem is in the iTune library vs the iPhone, or better yet in the way the new iPhone softaware works with the iTune music library.

1) Open itune and click on music

2) Highlight all your songs

3) Open the information window (command i) and select option

4) In volume adjustment the volume bar will be set on "none" unless you have all your songs

set at a different level, in any case move the bar anywhere "plus" or "minus", close the window allow iTune to set all your songs to the new setting, repeat the process and bring it the bar back to "none",

again close the window, allow iTune to set all our songs to none this might take a while depending

on how many songs you have

5) Last plug your iPhone in your computer and when it shows up in iTune click the iPhone then select music and finally sync, all your songs on your iPhone will be sync to the iTune music library new setting and the problem will be permanently gone....

Excellent idea - except for one thing.

Correct me if I'm wrong - but I can't do that for the standard ring tones, beeps, notification sounds, etc. installed on the iPhone - and they are all horrendously distorted too ...

So there is still a fault with the presentation of sound in iOS 5 as a whole to my (simple?!) mind.

ios 5.0.1 coming, will it be fixed?:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1268703

So I have been doing some searching of my own and have come up with a scenario where this bass distortion always happens.

As a preface to this I have to say that I have only adjusted the volume (in the options panel in iTunes) for a handful of albums that are characteristically mastered at lower levels than the rest. I have noticed that distortion occurs in the following circumstance: (I am using an iPhone 4 running iOS 5.0)

If I am playing music randomly through my library or a playlist and the playlist eventually reaches one of these "adjusted" songs the song will play completely fine at the adjusted volume. No problems. If, however, the song plays normally to the end and then moves on to an unadjusted track this subsequent track will be horribly distorted. Strangely this does not happen if I skip to the next track before the adjusted track has finished playing.

When the music becomes distorted the ONLY way to bring it all back to normal is to either skip to the next track or restart the phone.

Basically it seems like the iPhone music player, if allowed to play a song to completion (this also happens if I skip to near the end of the adjusted song and then let it finish playing and move onto the next track automatically) will somehow "remember" the volume adjustment applied to the previous track and this then "applies" it to the subsequent track resulting in horrible distortion.

I am not sure how to submit this report to Apple either, but I hope they can fix this because it is truly annoying. Perhaps this will help some of you guys out there too.