"Unknown Title" playlists

Unfortunately no luck after more and more hours of trying and updating to watchOS2. Since I posted, I turned off Apple Music on all my devices except my MacBook. I now sync my iPhone music with the MacBook. After you reminded me about the problem, I tried deleting all of the music off my iPhone via itunes. Music remained.... there were some tracks that kept appearing in the Music section under "On My Device". However, there were even more songs than that showing my iPhone. I'm now trying a couple of other steps, but I'm not optimistic - my Apple Watch is now showing nothing but Unknown Title playlists. I'll report back if anything works.

I'm becoming more and more convinced that this is due to some combination of Apple Music, and past purchases not correctly deleting from some cloud settings that sync with the phone, but remain invisible to the user (only to be seen on the watch).

No difference with OS2 for me either 😟 I actually have an extra Unknown Title playlist now, up to 12 in total. Hopefully someone will find a fix other than to restore your phone

Ok folks some progress. Note that I've tried a million different things, each of which may have had some effect, but I'm only reporting on the final steps that I took that seem to be most likely causally related to the fix. Note also this hasn't worked perfectly: I've gone from dozens (~50?) of Unknown Title playlists to only 1 -- I'm slowly repeating the process below to see if I can also get rid of the final one. Sorry that this isn't very clear, but I tried so many things I didn't document every single one, so this is a bit of a regurgitation of as much as I can figure out after the fact. To summarise, it seems like the key is to make sure all music tracks are deleted from the iPhone, but in my case many tracks were hidden or appeared out of no where, making it difficult to delete.

Turn off Music in the Cloud if it's on, and then delete *all* the music from the iPhone. This was not as straight forward as expected, but seems like the crucial step. Despite deleting all my music via Settings - General - Storage and iCloud Usage - Manage Storage - Music - and deleting everything, tracks remained on my device. Furthermore, in iTunes, even *more* and *stranger* tracks were appearing under "Music" below "On My Device" - greyed out tracks whose "Bit Rate" was "Stream". Looking at the iPhone itself, I had only a "Purchased" playlist, and all the tracks appearing in the Music app seemed to be past purchases of the current iTunes account, with no sign of the playlist being listed in iTunes. After turning off and turning on my Watch -- in order to force it to re-index music (is this a thing?) -- the playlists included *only* the Unknown Title playlists, and not the only playlist remaining on my iPhone (the "Purchased" playlist). Deleting these purchased songs on my iPhone was not straight forward, and I tried combinations of making the entire playlist "available offline" then deleting all Music from settings, re-syncing with iTunes in the hope I could de-select the playlist (which didn't work - this playlist didn't exist on my computer, and I had not "selected" any of these songs to be synced). Unfortunately because I tried so many different things, I can't describe exactly what worked, but at one point after making all the songs available offline, I then right-clicked the iPhone in iTunes and transferred all purchases to itunes - this seemed to transfer everything, but may have also resulted in some duplicates in my iTunes. After doing this, the songs appeared as "On my device" in iTunes, and I could then highlight them all and delete them. Sometimes when I plugged my iPhone back into iTunes, more songs would appear "On my device", and so I'd have to go through the same tedious complicated processes to remove those (not knowing if one step or all steps were necessary). Also, after toggling Music in the Cloud back on and then off again, the same past purchases would re-appear. Clearly my phone thought there was meant to be music on it.

Eventually, after hours of re-deleting, re-syncing with iTunes, having the music appear again and then re-deleting, iTunes no longer showed *any* music on my device under settings, and I was not syncing any music. At this point, the Apple Watch now only showed a single Unknown Title playlist, with one track - Lana Del Rey Video Games. If I tried to play this track, the watch threw up an error. Perhaps important or unrelated, now so close to having the watch behaving as normal, the bar in iTunes showing how much space is taken up on my iPhone was still showing 2 songs at 81 meg still on my phone, but I have no idea how or where these could be.

I also signed out of iCloud and iTunes on my iPhone at some points, but I'm not sure if this had an effect - again I'm sorry that I didn't document the order of the steps more carefully - truth be told I wasn't expecting any of this to make a difference.

After repeating all this just now, I don't seem to be able to get rid of Lana and the final playlist from my iPhone... now there's nothing that I can delete, because iTunes and iPhone are both showing no songs whatsoever, even after toggling iTunes on/off and Music in the Cloud on/off. If I sync Lana properly from iTunes, I simply get two appearances of it on my Watch.

Also note that this processes of constantly checking the watch (and restarting it constantly, perhaps unnecessarily), chewed up a lot of the watch's battery power, so only do this if you're close to full charge or have the charger handy.

I'll answer as many questions as I can if this is not clear (it's not), but I don't know how much more my ramblings will help specific instances. Please report back if any of this does or doesn't help.

Best of luck.

Yes, you're right (with caveats) and I forgot to mention something similar -- if you have no attachments to your data, it seems it'll be infinitely easier to just restore from new. At several points, I came very close to nuking the whole thing. The reason I ultimately did not, was stubbornness in thinking there must be a way to fix it, and, more importantly, there is some data that you necessarily lose if you start from scratch, and to me that wasn't acceptable.

I too have this issue.

So to confirm - none of us know why these stupid playlists get created and none of us know how to remove them, and iOS 9 / Apple Watch OS2 didn't help at all?

Brilliant.

APPLE!!!!!!! HELP!

so I found a fix for my one which doesn't involve restarting from new (because that is not an option for me). It is a little hacky but neither of my devices are jail broken or on betas so it's somewhat legit. Although do it at your own risk.

1) backup device

2) sign out of iTunes (not iCloud) on the phone

3) download iBrowse for your Mac (from where I can't remember but I could find it if someone needs help). This allows you to access folders in the phones root.

4) open iBrowse with the phone attached to the Mac and it will automatically show you the folders on the phone (this works on iOS 9).

5) the bottom folder (for me, may be different on yours) is iTunes App or something along those lines. What you want to do is delete everything underneath this folder. iBrowse is somewhat buggy so it will crash a few times and also not delete everything. What I did is I kept closing and opening the app and trying again until only the artwork folder was left (this one wouldn't delete no matter what I tried). Stage 1 done.

Next stage is just making sure important things you may have deleted are returned back to the phone.

6) unplug the phone from your Mac, turn it off, hold down the home button of the phone and plug it back into the Mac while still holding the home button (recovery mode). Select to update (not restore). This will reinstall iOS 9 and return the deleted important folders to the iTunes app.

7) once that's done, sign back into iTunes and re enable iTunes Match or music in the cloud etc then let that fully download.

8) restore your apple watch to factory and you can use your last backup to bring back your settings etc.

9) should be done

Worked for me, let me know if anyone else tries it.

In addition, when you next plug into iTunes, mine asked if I wanted to setup new phone or restore from backup. Click to setup new phone then it'll just bring up your phone again (doesn't actually wipe the phone).

Hi There! I tried your procedure and it removed the annoying "unknown title" in my apple watch. Finally It fixed my problem. Thanks a lot!

Obviously more people have this problem than we see here, and as usual Apple seems to ignore the issue. I would like to see them step up once in a while and accept responsibility for a known problem. I suppose I will resort to the total restore on my phone to get rid of the bogus playlist.

Hi guys

Been lurking on this thread the past two months trying to fix the issue for myself. Instead of restoring both devices and setting them up as new I had luck with this method just today!

1. On iPhone, Go to Settings/Music and turn off Apple Music and iCloud Music Library

2. Go to Settings/General/Storage and iCloud and select Music and delete all music. You'll also find this in Settings/Music and Downloaded Music I think

3. Turn your iPhone off and on

4. Unpair your Apple Watch and let the iPhone backup the Apple Watch.

5. Download iFunBox (iFunbox is a iOS File System Browsing App) and install the app on your computer.

6. Connect your iPhone with your computer

7. Open iTunes and then iFunBox. Go to the Raw System Storage/iTunes Control and delete everything inside here

8. Sync with iTunes on your computer. Of course, do not actually sync any music. This is just for iTunes to reconstruct the iTunes Library folder we deleted on the iPhone.

9. Pair your Apple Watch with your iPhone, you can even use the Backup from earlier. The backup doesn't contain Music data.

10. Let your Apple Watch finish syncing

11. Turn on Apple Music and iCloud Music Library on your iPhone

Be gone Unknown Titles!!!!

Good luck! Remember to always backup before doing something dramatic like this 😀

Edited 31.jul 22:24 since I mentioned beta software

Well. The same problem happened again. When I unsubscribed from Apple Music Playlist it made a new ghost playlist