Music not playing on iPhone

I've been seeing the same. 3gs with iOS 5.0.1. More info... It seems like internal indexing on the phone is messed up. Symptoms:

1. Many songs just don't play. The play icon (triangle) shows at the top, but the time index stays at 0:00. It seems consistant that certain songs play, and certain songs don't.
2. Hitting shuffle for all songs often shows interesting results: Album art for one song will show briefly, and then it will switch to another. Sometimes it will show one art, then immediately show a 2nd art, then play a 3rd song (while still displaying 2nd art, song name, artist).
3. After several songs, shuffle will just stop, hanging with symptom #1. Hitting back, then shuffle again will usually start something playing, often with symptom #2.
4. Pulling up the list of artists, I've found artists missing - but when I search by song, the songs exist.

I didn't notice this behavior before iOS5. I'm not sure if it started in 5.0.0 or 5.0.1.

My ID3 tags are consistantly v2.3. The music hasn't changed since upgrading to iOS5. This worked fine previously.

Mine is doing the same thing...It will play about 2 songs and then it will show the album cover of one song and play another song alltogether. If you try and go to the song it is not playing, but showing you the cover of, it will not play it at all. I have tried to shut the phone off and restart, but that doesn't work. Then after a couple of songs, it will just not play any songs at all. Help!!!

mine is doing the same thing...phone rings, I can hear callers, I can hear Siri - although i think Siri chooses not to hear my accent...the music switches to other songs when not prompted to, and there is no sound!

Help would be great!

I have same problem:

- song is playing but no sound, play icon is showing, the pause button is displayed, but the song is stuck at 0:00

- skipping to other songs does not fix it

- sometimes, the album cover of the song I select pops up quickly but then quickly changes to another song which then does not play

- it seems to be inconsistent. Sometimes a given song will play but if I FF to next song, next song won't play and the first song won't play if I go back either.

I am pretty sure the music files are fine and that this is a software glitch with 5.0.1. I upgraded from the 3gs (5.0.0) to the 4s with 5.0.1 (9A405) about 3 days ago.

I don't know any way to make it better.

I think I fixed my problem. I have my iPhone music selectively synced to 4 folders. I UNclicked the folders and synced so that all music was removed from my iPhone. I then re-clicked the folders and they synced back onto my iPhone.

Interestingly, there were 27 items (I could not find the error display to tell me which ones) that could not sync.

It seems to be working ok now. I would be interested to know if this solution works for others.

Cheers.

I have a temporary solution. Click twice on the home button - you will see you active apps along the bottom of the screen - swipe your finger to the right and the play fwd and rew buttons for music will appear. Press play and hey presto, your music should play. If not, go back into the music app and pause the song that is playing or make sure the menu is displayed, not an individual song.

This is a work around, so if anyone has any other ideas, do share!

I have a bigger problem now with iTunes sync.

With respect to music, I sync only folders. I make a couple folders with music I want on my iphone, and I sync only those folders.

When I go to iTunes, and click in the LEFT column under my iPhone the MUSIC tab, it shows (theoretically) all music on the iPhone. This list should change when a person clicks or unclicks folders or music to sync (under the TOP tab "music" when the iPhone in the left column is selected).

Sorry for all the details but I think it is important.

Anyhow, my problem is that this list of sync'd music is only partly sync'd. Some items are grey with a sync circle (not spinning) beside them. Further, the songs that are NOT synced have no "kind" (purchased AAC, MP3 etc).

I cannot reset this list. I think, based on reading many other posts, that maybe there is 1 corrupt file in the list that is hanging up the process. However, I cannot delete this list or refresh it.

Anybody know how to do this? I tried removing all music from my iphone (success) and syncing only 1 song. Couldn't do it.

Reset and erased my phone. Didn't help.

Currently, I have no music on my phone. All music works in iTunes. I can't copy even 1 song to my iPhone. I think this "sync list" is hte source of my problem but I can't delete or refresh it.

Jason

Problem fixed with Itunes "restore" (while iPhone plugged into it). Note that in my above post, I tried the hard reset of the iPhone by holding the 2 buttons down at the same time. This did not help.

I think the source of the problem was with the list of "syncing" music. To see this list, open iTunes, plug in your phone, and in left hand column in iTunes, click on the arrow beside your phone to show contents of phone. Click on music. Songs for me fell into 3 categories:

- exclamation mark beside them (as if iTunes could not find the music file)

- check mark beside them (synced, all ok)

- greyed out, "sync" symbol present, and "kind" of music absent (waiting to be synced)

iTunes would sync some songs, but not all songs. I could get about 60% of all songs onto my phone.

To recap: my initial problem was that some songs on my iPhone would not play and some songs would skip over to the next song, and if I used FF or to go to next song, could completely hang up all playback of music on iPhone.

The "restore" appeared to refresh the list of "syncing" music. Since all original files on my computer were not corrupt, I did not have to convert or delete any of my music files.

I don't know why this occurred. It is possible it occured when I initially bought and synced my new iPhone 4s with iCloud. It is also possible that it is a wi-fi sync error. I am very interested to learn how or why it happened.

Hope this helps someone.🙂

Jason

iPhone 4s with iOS 5.0.1 and using iMac for iTunes

I started to have this problems after I tried to sync my songs with iCloud, about 3 weeks ago. Then I tried to iMatch because I thought I couldn't upload all the songs to iCloud. Then I paid the $24,99 to "have the right" to listen to my albums (CDs) I had uploaded previously. No succes on it so far. Restoring doesn't help. I called the Apple support and they told me that as I don't have the "Phone Support" included in my purchase, I should pay $29.99 to have it. Of course I don't have. I bought my iPod in 2010 and the warranty just covers for 90 days! I started to have this bugs 3 weeks ago!!!!!! There's nothing to see with the warranty!

But I have talked to them 3 times and they were not able to help yet, so why should I pay more? Also, I have already paid $24.99 the iMatch-iCloud rent of storage of MY OWN songs. I guess they didn't know what they did with the last software update. Steve Jobs was the only one who knew it and would know how to fix these problems... Now it's only money that matter. Even paying, they are still not able to help AT ALL.

I've turned off iTunes iMatch on both the phone and the pc and then highlighted the music that i'd like to have, copy it, put it in a playlist then dragged the playlist onto the iphone part. The music is still copying over to the phone but it is working so far!

I may have found a solution (at least it fixed my problem, and I'm using iTunes Match on a 4S):

I was noticing this problem as well. It seemed to me, as was stated earlier, that it was consistent. It didn't get stuck with all songs. But the songs that wouldn't play, wouldn't play no matter what I did--playing it by navigating to it, or having Siri play it. And if you tried to restart/play previous song, as someone said, it would skip over it again and play the next one with all the wierd artwork problems...

After doing some research, it looks like it might be a corrupted file during the iCloud download process. The song played fine on the computer, but not on my iphone. So I found the file in the music app and deleted it (swipe left to right, like deleting an email or note, etc.). Then the cloud icon showed up and I downloaded it again. I then asked Siri to play it, and it worked!

You can also delete your whole music library off of the device (it stays in the cloud with iTunes Match), and redownload the songs as you play them, etc. Go to Settings > General > Usage, then wait a few seconds for Music to appear. You can then swipe/edit to delete all music and start downloading again. That may fix some problems.

Hope this helps.

I got this problem too after confusing Music during a sync and presumably corrupting a library. I was suspicious as Settings > General > Usage storage claimed I had 20 Gb of music but also 18Gb available, on a 32G phone. Didn't add up, so clearly the files that wouldn't play weren't there (5000 of them in my case).

So just go there and swipe left to delete all that not-really-there music and then sync again (with your mac/pc iTunes or with the Cloud or Match) and you'll find it will play things again.

Exact same problem here. Can't play any music or audio from videos, however the speaker seems to be working fine as I can still use and hear Siri etc.

this has been happening to me too.

any suggestions anyone?

I have the same problem, but in my iPod touch.

Joaop. da vida...