iOS 6: Music playback issues?

i'm so happy for you.

I celebrated too early with 6.1.3 (or 2?) when we got the new music player. It got better, but returned to the same old problems--random but app use and memory related. My ios5 devices never lose their spot in the playlist. The major change to ios6? Notifications and Do not disturb (which I like). I have turned off all notifications on everything except Apple apps (Facetime, Messages, Calendar). I've noticed that after an update Facebook is back in notifications.

Anyways, to the point, I have not lost my spot in my playlist for probably 2-3 months now. The only change I made was to remove all notifications. I don't know if this is a real fix or an acceptable one for those who use notifications, but it has worked for me.

Ok.... here's another problem which is now really starting to **** me off. With the onset of winter, it's not easy to keep using my bose QC-15 headphones, so I switched to the earbuds that came with the phone.

Twice in the past week, I had the same playback skipping/screw up issue. It plays, I start/stop as normal, it plays, I keep doing that and all of a sudden, the player plays the next song, but the ui controls are still stuck on the previous song.

I'll often use the remote control rather than unlock the phone, but apart from the bose remote v.s. the earbud remote, my actions remain pretty much the same.

The only consistent pattern I'm seeing now or doing different now (that it seems to screw up frequently) compared to then (6 months ago when it virtually never screwed up) is:

1) If I sync the phone (by usb) to my mac mini and leave it plugged in overnight, the next day syncs time out (I can't imagine the usb port would "tire itself out" by keeping the phone charged, and lose the ability to talk to the phone... It's mostly at 95%+ capacity left when I get home... It stays charged on my work computer all day... that and the computer shouldn't actually be talking to the phone when it's sitting there idle)

2) Syncs are now producing the mac infamous BBOD and syncs take up to several very long minutes at a time (I sync almost every day so it should hardly take more than 30 seconds from past experience)... Only difference here might be due to having my tv shows and movies on my network file server, but I haven't added much in the past few months.

3) I use the earbuds that came with the phone

I'm still not running apps differently than before, I still play the same frequency and number of songs that I played for years....

Could it be forced obsolescence if I'm still on itunes 10.7 and ios 6.1.4?? I hope not.

It is unreal how horrible the shuffle is this makes me so mad when only thing i really care about is for my ipod to remeber what my last song played was so i dont have to listen to same stuf over and over

Come on apple get ur heads out of ur bums and fix this cause i've thought about breaking my ipod and its ur falt

Yep, this has been bugging me considerably on my 5th Gen iPod since the iOS7 upgrade. It happened very occasionally on iOS6, but not often enough to be that annoying. I find it most annoying when driving as every time I get in the car I'v got to select the ablum/tracks I want to listen to. Even if I've only run into the shops breifly, it's lost it's way.

Here's what I've noticed:

1) Spotify is not affected by this, at least when listening to your Spotify content(offline or online). I'm not sure about when listening to local files at this point as I don't use it for that. I have tested this considerably over the last few months, and if Spotify was running when I stopped the car or pulled my headphones out, it will always start back up form where it left off when reconnected.

2) In iOS7, it's not just the built in music player that suffers from this issue. I have installed both Audyssey and Picky, which have the same problem. If either of those apps are running when disconnected, they still start up automatically when reconnected but jump to some random song and change the repeat and shuffle settings.

3) If an app such as Audyssey or Picky are running when disconnected, and the built in music player is also still sitting in the background, when reconnected, the original app breifly displays the previous song that was being played before the default app takes over and starts on random shuffle.

This is clearly an iOS7 audio engine issue, and I am suprised it has not been fixed yet. The ONLY reason I still use my iPod is because of other annoying issues that I've discovered using my Galaxy S3(usb in car does not function with ext SD, Bluetooth audio speeds up/slows down). If those issues are rectified in the new gen of Galaxy phones, or another Android based phone, I will be dumping my Apple products completely.

So Apple...if you are trying to send away your long time users who have used you based on your previosly great integration of music and mobile functionality...you are certainly going about it the right way!!!

I take it as there hasn't been an update to this since January, you have either all moved to Android or Apple forked up a decent compensation package for the nuisance and asked you all to keep quiet about it!!!

Probably the former given the way people felt about this issue.

Each update that comes along, I check to see if it is fixed, alas still no joy, I think if you get a new device and register it as new rather than upgrading in iTunes there is a good success rate (I'm sure if that is not the case someone here will correct me!).

Otherwise has anyone seen or come up with a cure to this ridiculous issue created and as yet unfixed by Apple developers?

I am due to upgrade in September, hopefully iPhone 6 will launch then, from what has been leaked, it looks like a 6 is what I will want, but if this playlist issue (along with a few other issues I am getting) still exists even if I treat it as a new phone, then it will be costly to switch to the S5 (like the HTC but it's a Windows phone).

What to do??????

My sentiment to Apple is now on a par to Microsoft, thieving pirates who care nothing for the loyal consumer!

This issue has been solved for me since upgrading to iOS7/iPhone 5S. Not sure if it was the software update, the new phone or sheer dumb luck that fixed the problem, but I haven't encountered it once since last fall.

For me it's jsut as bad if not worse. About 1 in 4 times when I get in my car and plug in it jumps back to a random point in the playlist.

Even worse for me is that the reminder app doesn't seem to ever update its badge. The built in apps are all fairly terrible and Apple seems to have spent all their time making the UI dumber and uglier over the last couple years.

Hey,

Glad to hear your issue went away, did you treat your 5s as a new phone or upgrade everything from your previous phone? I think it makes a difference.

Sorry to hear that your problems are getting worse. I guess it seems that this discussion has died down as a lot of people have either gone Android, Windows or 5s/c and in doing so the problem has gone away.

Would be interesting to know how many still have problems.

I'm fairly certain that most folks still are having issues with playback (much like myself) but are choosing to cope with the difficulty. I would love for the app to work as it once did (by remembering where I am in a song or playlist or shuffle) instead of always resetting to play from the beginning of the playlist or shuffle.

It's been a while, but I'm almost certain I restored using the last backup from my previous phone.

Still have the problem on my iPhone 5 - worse than ever. I think the previous poster was correct, people have learned to deal with this ridiculous bug that has somehow managed to stump Apple for years.

I don't think they're stumped... they're just not trying. This is a basic requirement for any app to save state so that when the app gets removed from memory it can be reloaded seamlessly. Sadly as Apple gets more aggressive in removing apps from memory to save power with each release, more of my apps lose their place. Even the well-written ones that remember their place incur long times to reload if I leave them unused for a few moments.

Well the shuffel/restart problem may have been fixed.. I've not been using my iphone in the car I was having the problem with the older iPod that constantly started off at the front of the shuffled playlist, but there are new fun problems that were introduced in iOS7 that persist to today:

When playing a video in another app such as Facebook or Safari, the audio playback source will get STUCK in that setting, so later, after I've closed out of Safari or Facebook and link up my external bluetooth speakers and tell it to resume playing music, the iPhone5S does NOT play music. Swiping up to see the audio controls shows that iOS 7 is still set on source "Safari" or source "Facebook" - and those apps are not active. The phone won't resume the last playlist at all.