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

Thank you for this!! Why in the #%^% have they made it so complicated!? What happened to drag and drop?????

Thank you! That worked like a charm to me!

Wow. Have read through this thread but only once so far and am mildly confused.

I landed here because my phone is missing half the playlists from my desk top.

Am I right that, fundamentally, Apply seems to be ignoring the concept of having a portion of ones music library physically duplicated onto each device (space being the limiting factor). It may come as a shock to the mavens of Silicon Valley, but I am occasionally in locations without wifi, and still want access to (some of) my music. Surely the best way to control (serve) that is from the desktop or wherever ones physical music Library is. Another shock for the genii ... not all my music was purchased from Apple, I do actually have CDS that have been ripped into my Library, and other material legally downloaded.

I see other threads on related topics too. A lot of material with much duplication. Presumably much of it is accurate.

Im still trying to sort through whats relevant to my situation.

Has anyone pulled together an authoritative one page "dummies guide to Apple Music and syncing your own Library and playlists"?

I dont post many comments but i had to log in and tell you that this was a life saver!! i have zero idea how those weren't checked/switched on, but i checked both and immediately everything synced!!! thank you so much!!

Very helpful! Thanks! Thanks indeed!

The question to Apple is: In the phrase Show Music Available Offline, why don't you add the word Only? You can say that "only" is in a very small font down there. But, who does read that, when the title seems to be clear enough? "Only" is the key word of the phrase, and it's missing

Ok, these workarounds just don't answer a fundamental question/

Without turning iCloud music library OFF (because I've added so many albums via Apple Music since subscribing), how do you add music on your computer in your iTunes library to your iPhone as we used to do via drag and drop? From what folks are saying here, the only option is to turn off iCloud music library and use iTunes as you used to. But, if you do this, then you can't add music from Apple Music on your iPhone or other device.

The instructions I found to do this with iCloud music library on was to click the ... button and then click "Add To" and then select your device. Then, click on your phone in iTunes and then sync. Out of 10 albums or so, both in mp3 and AAC format, this worked once, and only after converting the mp3 album to AAC. Since then, this has not worked and I can't add anything from my MacBook to my iPhone via iTunes.

I don't want to turn off iCloud Music Library just to manually add music, as that defeats the purpose. I'm going to lose everything I already added to My Music since I started Apple Music. I have mixtapes and albums that are just not available in Apple Music and I want to put them on my phone and use Apple Music. This just should not be difficult to accomplish.

Any new insights on this?

"for you" and "new" are still on my iPhone and iPad, but has disappeared from my MacBook Pro

The way it is suppose to work (which may not be exactly what you want):

1. On your iPhone: Settings -> Music -> iCloud Music Library is on
2. On your Mac: iTunes -> Preferences -> General -> iCloud Music Library is on
3. Load new stuff into iTunes on your Mac
4. Select the new stuff just loaded, right click, and pick a menu item that is towards the top that says something like "Make Available to the cloud" or something to that effect. You might not see it. I believe another option is in iTunes do File -> Library -> Update iCloud Music Library A spinning circle with a notch out of it should appear on the top right. You can click it and see its progress and what it is doing.
5. On the iPhone in Music, pick My Music (bottom right) and Library. The items just loaded will appear on your iPhone. One place they will show up is "Recently Added". Poke the Album icon and not the little play arrow in the bottom. Or you can poke "Recently Added" and it will give you a list of recently added albums. From there pick the album you want to add. These two paths get you to the same place. A screen showing the album and the list of songs.
6. Poke the ... for the album -- which is the top ...
7. Poke Make Available Offline Note: (this confused me) When something is marked as Available Offline, the upper corner of the item becomes white with a tiny phone in it. The album can be marked this way or the individual tracks can be marked this way or both. I've not tinkered with this enough to fully grasp all of the subtleties -- to me, this is a mistake. I'd prefer the Make Available Offline menu item for the album to simply be a short cut of making each track Available Offline.
8. Go backwards through the menus (top left arrow pointing left with some text depending on where you are) until you get to the My Music screen with Library. You will see a counter counting down the number of tracks left to suck over.

I believe that these tracks are not coming from your Mac but from the cloud. In other words, there is no reason to have the iPhone cabled to your Mac during any of these operations.

We are all groping in the dark. The above generally works for me but there are times when the upload will error off or whatever. I also don't know when the items appear on the iPhone -- when you first rip them or when you first start the upload or when the upload finally finishes.

This may not be what you want. e.g. if you rip using Apple Lossless and you want Apple Lossless on your iPhone then this method fails. For me, I ripped using Apple Lossless but then I checked the "Convert higher bit rate songs to 256 kbps AAC" when I transfer them (before using Apple Music) to save space. So now with Apple Music, I'm essentially getting the same thing but it will be DRM tainted (on the iPhone).

To view it another way: once you turn on Apple Music (service) and iCloud Music Library on your iPhone, your music library on your iPhone essentially is owned by Apple -- but, the flip side is you get to listen to any and all that is in Apple's library. For tracks that you own which is not in Apple's library, I am not sure precisely what is happening yet but eventually they do show up as available on your iPhone (at least for me they do) and if you choose, you can make them available offline which means pull over a copy and save it on your iPhone. Legend has it that this copy with have DRM and 256 kbps AAC but I don't know how to check that on my iPhone.

To me, the overall design of Apple Music (service) is flawed and conflicted with iTunes Match. The architects did not clearly lay out where one starts and the other one ends nor what Apple customers would want generally. As they tout... music is very fundamental to "Apple" -- well, not really. It is very fundamental to a great majority of Apple customers. That is what they forgot.

What pedz describes may or may not work, but really... how is this convoluted user experience in any way compatible with what Apple is supposed to be about? One shouldn't need to solve a mystery in order to keep using something that used to work pretty well.

Now if only I could figure out why tracks on an album I purchased thru iTunes play on my phone when I am listening to its playlist even though they are not shown there and shouldn't be there because I never added them. Ah well, one problem at a time I guess.

Ah, thank you pedz! I didn't have iCloud Music Library selected in iTunes on my Mac so now everything i had on my Mac has been merged with what I added to my music via Apple Music on my iPhone. I'll have to work with this and see what happens when I add a new album or mixtape to my computer and want to get that on my iPhone (or in the Cloud, I should say).

You are correct, I shouldn't need my cable, but this whole thing is convoluted and there are no clear instructions or guidance from Apple on this. Frustrating experience.

On the face of it, the root cause is that Apple appears to have chosen to de-emphasise, if not ignore, significant segments of the user base. That's their prerogative of course, they do have to prioritise etc. What I don't get is the way they seem to do this without communicating any particular rationale. Users seem to be left to their on devices to figure out kludges etc; and their is no real guidance as to whether the problem is a bug that is being worked on, or is in fact deliberate and we better get used to it.

I do wonder what sort of user input they got to the design of Apple Music and what sort of testing they did pre-release.

Another example of this is their mail client in iOS. They do not directly support the basic facility of: doing a search, then selecting all the messages found by the search to move to a folder or delete. (There's a very bizarre kludge that sometimes works but I cannot believe was designed that way and is certainly not documented). This makes it almost impossible to keep mail organised, and so I have to go to another client on desk top to do that. Theres a ton of messages in the fora on this, just like this topic, but no real explanation from Apple that Im aware of.

As for this topic ... I'd have to say that overall its very questionable whether Apple Music will be worthwhile or not. Yes, it has some good stuff, but will it be worth it for all the aggro of working around these problems.

I agree with all that you said.

I just bought my first iPhone in March. I've been in computers since 1977 and I'm just now trying and learning the iPhone and iPad and that UI paradigm so I consider myself an outsider. But, to me there are so many things the UI lacks it is amazing to me that it is surviving. Before the iPhone, I toyed with a friends Android for a month or more and it is no better for sure.

For example on the Mac, I can command-click most any list and do a multi-select but I can't do anything equivalent to that on the iPhone. It seems plausible that I could pick and hold one item on the list and then poke other items to do a multi-select.

Specifically with Apple Music (the app) I can look at a track and dig down and view the album and the group but there is no way for me to go to the iTunes store and see all the albums for that group from that angle of attack. I have to start from scratch from the "For You" point and dig back down usually doing a search for the group. Seems very short sighted.

Following your off topic comment about mail -- I've stopped using folders. I have folders for each year but that's it. On the Mac at least, the search is so fast and so much more versatile that folders do not help me out. I learned this first via gmail's lack of folders. I wish I could tag email messages but I've not seen anyone doing that yet (except Google via gmail but I don't want a folder looking thing for each tag; I just want a tag.

I sit at a computer all day so I consider the computer "reality" and the iPhone just an absurd toy to play with. I'd never write a serious email on the iPhone; it is just too painful and slow. That (again) reinforces the idea that I'm somewhat an outsider to the real iPhone / smart phone community so I tend to just explore and try to help rather than point out the issues that I see.

magglesfromcockeysville wrote:

Yes...this works, BUT then you loose all Apple Music you downloaded for offline listening when you disable iCloud Music Library. When iCloud Music Library is enabled, iTunes thinks you have iMatch turned on (even if you did not subscribe) and you can sync via Cloud, but device does not get library from cloud. So you have a choice: keep iCloud off and load your library OR enable iCloud to save Apple Music for offline.

Anyone have another solution?

maggles

Yes, turning off iCloud music library wipes out your Apple Music content on your iOS device. This is a *horrible* way for it to work and now with all these problems, Apple Music loses almost all of its functionality. I can't believe how complicated it is just to make Apple Music work.

AmoebaMan23 wrote:

I'm pretty sure I'm having the same problem here.

It seems that with the advent of Apple Music and the iCloud Library, the model has shifted from your Library being based on a computer and being pushed (synced) to portable devices, to the Library being based in the cloud itself (i.e. that's where the "official" or "original" copy of music/playlist/etc. data is kept), from whence it is pushed (synced) to all your devices, whether they're stationary computers, or portables.

I have two iPhones (recently upgraded to 6 and haven't disposed of my old 5 yet), and two computers (iMac and Macbook Air), so what I say here is the best explanation I could come up with to describe the behavior I witnessed coming across this bug. Hopefully some Apple engineer will read this, and maybe it'll help. My ability to actually tell what is going on, however, is severely hampered by not having direct access (a web portal maybe?) to the iCloud Library itself, only the mirrors of it on my devices (which are flawed and evidently do not update very quickly).

I can't speak for the first device I activated (my iPhone 6) because there was no other platform to see if it was syncing with. When I updated and activated Apple Music and the iCloud Library on the others though, it seemed as if there was a brief period (on the order of half an hour) during which changes were synced properly, including playlists, ratings, play counts, and song removals (I'll get to additions later). After this period ended--I cannot say definitively what ended it but I suspect it has to do with expiring/terminated connections), absolutely no more changes were synced at all, with the sole exception of music library additions. Moreover, any changes I made on my iTunes were actually reverted seconds later--I would try to delete a playlist and it would pop back up before my eyes.

The basic problem to me seems to be related to devices pushing updates back to iCloud's Library. For some reason devices are suddenly and irreversibly losing their ability to push Library changes back to iCloud. The only exception is adding songs, which I suspect is because the actual change is performed within Apple's servers (your device submits the addition request to Apple Music, which then passes it to iCloud Library), while things like modifying playlists and deleting songs must go directly from your device to the cloud.

That's my best guess. I have a decent knowledge of programming and networking and such, but I'm by no means an expect. All I know is that if this crap doesn't get ironed out, I'm going to have to take a look at Spotify.

Thank you for your post. I found it very helpful. Your analysis shows that the problem we here are facing is indeed a deep structural flaw within iCloud. All the suggestions found in the various help boards are tiny, tap dancing steps around the fact that iCloud is seriously flawed and does not work as intended. Until Apple figures out that iCloud is broken, and devotes resources to fix it, we are not likely to see any real fix anytime soon.

I too am looking hard at Spotify now.

This is exactly what I'm finding. Has anyone worked out a fix that doesn't involve hacking iTunes libraries?