Playlists and music are not syncing (can't add any music to my iPhone now)

For me, I had a mismatch between my phone and Mac. I'm still experimenting but if you have iCloud Music Library checked on your phone, it appears that the developers assumed it would also be enabled on your Mac. e.g. on your Mac, iTunes => Preferences => General -- check "iCloud Music Library".

As I said, I'm still experimenting but my actions and the results are starting to make a bit of sense. e.g. if I delete a playlist on my Mac, it magically disappears from my iPhone shortly there after -- no sync -- no nothing.

Again... I'm just now monkeying with this so YMMV.

Also, in my case, I did not have any super useful playlists or hand crafted metadata that I was worried about.

The adventure continues 😠

I have now managed to enable icloud music library both in itunes and my iphone. My playlists now appear on both ends. I can save Apple music songs to my iphone and add them to playlists I had from itunes. All nice, BUT - my smart (andonly smart) playlists get duplicated for some reasons on both locations - Up to 5 times. I tried deleting the 5 redundant playlists on itunes - spent 30 minutes doing that, only to see them re-created again.......

Any idea now?

Not really "help" but... what I happened to have done was delete all my playlists on both the iPhone and the Mac while iCloud Music Library was off. When I enabled it again, the old playlists reappeared (because they had been in the cloud previously). I deleted all of those too and then started from scratch and built one smart play list and one normal playlist. So far, no duplicates.

My internet link is very small. When I enabled the iCloud Music Library on the Mac, it started pushing things up to the cloud. I have absolutely no idea how long this may take. I rip my CDs using "Apple Lossless" which may or may not be what is stored in the cloud (I assume its not). If all 115G needs to be uploaded, it will take about 5 days. giggle.

When I push it to my iPhone, I have the "Convert higher bit rate songs to 256 kbs AAC" checked. That will probably muck with some Apple pie somewhere somehow.

But when I was adding songs to my normal playlist, one album had two duplicate songs. One copy said has a cloud with a strike through it, the other copy has a cloud with the down arrow. It would not let me add the songs with the cloud with a slash through it saying "iCloud Music Library playlists can only contain sogs from you iCloud Music Library. If you continue, <playlist> will be removed from your iCloud Music Library and will only be available on this computer." Hmm.... I do *not* have iTunes Match... that might affect things as well.

I'm going to see how things work after the Mac is synced to the cloud ... if / when that ever happens.

As you say, the adventure continues. So many options... so little time :-)

Thanks for your response. I'm too scared for now to play as I took years to build my current playlists. As you said - we don't have time for experiments. Apple has to realize that one of the reasons for its success was always that things worked - directly. I know very few people we have apple HW and who have the time to tweak and play around......

So for now I need to scroll pas endless screen to find my play list 😟

The problem with that is once you toggle that switch whatever music you did download is gone. I tarted rebuilding my library again last night, using only my phone. Shut down my Mac and iPad and once I was done downloading a batch of about 1000 songs, I enabled both devices and immediately there were mismatched albums, songs, etc. disabled iCloud music on my phone, rebooted and re-enabled, that got the libraries to finally match but now I have to re-download those songs. This is a royal pain in the *** since me typical library hovers well above 10k songs.

We shouldn't have to re-toggle features across multiple devices just to get them to sync and even that comes with a price. Obviously they didn't test jack on this new service otherwise they'd have seen it was crap. Freaking Zune worked ten times better.

Interestingly, I do not have the Show Music Available Offline option, so there is nothing to uncheck.

In my case I purchased 3 songs from the iTunes store last night and added them to my playlist for my phone. Only one came over to the phone when I synced it.

Last night I connected both my iPhone and my iPad via cable to my PC with iTunes and tried to get them all synced and backed up. I began having issues with a playlist not syncing. I eventually gave up and went to bed, leaving them connected overnight, hoping maybe all they needed was time. This morning I found exactly what had happened to you, with a duplicate (though not exactly) "playlist1" added . No idea how that occurred, certainly nothing I did unless I was sleepwalking (which I don't do!).

This worked for me.

Had this same issue about 6 months ago on other versions of iTunes and iOS.

This doesn't work for me. Nice to know Apple thoroughly test new software. 😟 So annoying because all the music I had on my phone is kind of just stuffed in there and I can't seem to sort them into my playlist again by syncing to my laptop again.

Thanks for the info on this. Ive was wondering why i couldn't see any of my music or drag and drop music from my mac to my phone.

This release is another ******* nightmare from itunes. In what way you might ask? Well the notion of having my entire library available on my phone without taking data space is great, but......what about your high quality (ie. not mp3, but lossless) library that you spent years on? Apple music, icloud will take over your library and downgrade it to save server space from apples end and tags and art etc could be another nightmare to fix. It is unfortunate that there couldn't be a cloud copy of your library, downgraded bitrate if need be, for you phone and your original library stays the same for at home use. Also, why can't one add and delete songs from their computer from itunes library like I have always done? That option is now gone!! Total mess from the evil giant. Time to switch media players.

On your mac open iTunes and go to Account>Authorise This Computer... (as shown) and then and the information asked for.

This is how I used to manage things.

I’d have several smart playlists.

When syncing to phone, I’d select the ones that I want depending on space.

Sync would refresh the playlists, adding and removing content as needed.

Now, I can’t see a way where I can decide which playlists are syncing and what is/isn’t going onto my phone.

Right now, my phone is rammed to the rafters and I have no idea how to selectively remove and update. My phone should only ever have what I have ticked in playlists added to it. Right now that should be nothing as all my smart playlists have broken as they refer to other playlists within themselves.

How do I manage in the new structure?

I believe you have two choices but I have not personally experimented extensively yet with either.

First, iCloud Music Library is turn on or off from iTunes -> Preferences -> iCloud Music Library. On the iPhone, it is Settings -> Music -> iCloud Music Library. You want these two settings to match or the behavior is something that I can't understand.

If you pick to have iCloud Music Library off for both, then I believe things work like you are use to. You can pick and choose on the Mac the content you want to sync to the phone.

If you pick to have iCloud Music Libray on for both, then you have to go to the iPhone, pick an album, pick the three dots, and then pick "Remove from My Music" I think will remove it from the iCloud but not from your Mac's real actual music library. I would test this with a single album first. Perhaps go to Settings -> General -> Usage -> Storage and see how much space Music is consuming, remove a few albums, and see if the space is changing.

On the Mac iTunes, if you pick Music on the Left, Playlists in the middle, and poke the three dots to the right of the Random symbol in the playlists banner, you get an interesting menu. One item is Add To. Poke it and you get a list of devices. A previous person said you can pick which devices to sync the playlist to but I can't get that to do anything for me at all... but YMMV.

All this is clearly broken nine ways from Sunday. They pushed out iTunes 12.2.1 yesterday but I can't tell any difference.

If you do any experimenting and discover any new things, please report back.

I have neither of those choices for iCloud Music Library on either my PC version of iTunes or on my iPhone. No mention of iCloud Music Library anywhere I see. Are you possibly referring to iTunes Match? I do not use that.

Just installed 12.2.1 on my PC, no difference I can see.