Songs disappear from my playlist

Just on holiday in Spain - this has emptied out almost all songas from two of my playlists . Apple ones don't seem effected- or one I have with very old songs. Wonder if this is licensing problems ? Have tried trick turning on and off iCloud library but no success - very frustrating as took ages to add and no idea if I will get back when in UK. They have 3 months to sort then back to spotify I will go.

After talking twice with Apple Support, I was still not able to get a solution. Then I did the following to get my iTunes back on my Mac by using my March 1, 2015 iTunes backup I had on an external drive. (By the way, I discovered that I could not access my iTunes copies on my Time Machine, but that is now another problem):

- From the Mac menu bar at the top of the computer screen, choose iTunes > Preferences. Deselect the option for iCloud Music Library. Click OK to accept the change

- On the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch: In Settings, tap Music. Turn off iCloud Music Library.

- Copied the song and home videos added to iTunes since the date of my backup, I'm my case March 1, 2015. I copied these file to folders I created in Finder, under Documents. One folder for Songs, and 1 other folder for Videos.

- Erased iTunes and all folders under it, so only the (Apple) Music folder was showing, being empty

- Copied my iTunes from March 1, 2015 to the Music folder

- Clicked in iTunes on my Music Library and then added my saved songs by clicking on File / Add to Playlist and selecting the songs I had copied earlier to the folder "Songs since March 1".

- Clicked in iTunes on my Home Video Library and then added my saved videos by clicking on File / Add to Playlist and selecting the videos I had copied to the folder "Videos since March 1".

I synced my iPhone and iPad to my Mac. Everything is working fine so far. I'm not going to Apple's Music until I'm sure everything continues to work fine for a few days. And I'll make sure that I make a complete backup of my iTunes before implementing Apple Music again.

Eruedraith wrote:

New development today: I was frustrated with the disappearing songs, so I stopped trying to add them back in. Today, however, about 100 songs that had previously disappeared showed back up in the playlist again. Perhaps Apple is getting their servers in order?

They are bound to eventually ... or the service will fail miserably.

TomekOsiowy wrote:

The worse thing in this fruit-land is syncing and using more than 1 iOS device for whole music library. Now I have deleted manully all the music from Mac (in iTunes), I use iPhone to play everywhere (home at Apple TV, on the go, in car etc.), and I try to have the same music library on iPad mini 2, but it seems to be not possible to have offline 1:1 copy of the iPhone music library. I am tired, this ecosystem is terrible, it is beatifuly packaged communism and fascism in one. I am from Poland and I know results of — and how works — communism and fascism.

You save yourself a lot of sanity by taking a long holiday from Apple Music and check back in a couple of months.

Hello. Adding to the pile. Playlist I created from my main Spotify playlist lost 100 of its songs over the weekend. I was at the gym so figured I would look online when I got home for solotion and proceeded to add some new songs to the almost empty playlist. Get home, none of the songs I added stayed in the playlist along with the 100 songs that disappeared. Tried the two solutions in this conversation (going into My Music and turning off and on the "show music available offline" option then also toggling the iCloud music library option in the settings menu) and neither worked. Right now, all playlists but 1 show any music in them. As stated by others, this is pitiful and we will all pop back to Spotify ASAP if apple cant get its servers in order. Went through this same thing when MobileMe first launched and things just didn't sync right. one might have thought the company learned from that. Clearly not. APPLE - you have one chance to make this right as most of us will only give you a little slack to fix this and assume you realize Spotify offers pretty much the same thing but it actually works right.

I have been dealing with this issue for over a year. I don't use the Cloud music service, but occasionally download tracks from the iTunes store. When I put purchased tracks in a playlist on my iPhone, or on my computer in iTunes, they stick around for awhile and then vanish. For example, I recently purchased three separate albums and created a tracklist combining them all. After a few hours, the trackless only contains one album, and not the others. This is extremely annoying! The only way around it for me is to burn the tracks onto a cd and then re-import them. I shouldn't have to do this!

I'm pretty sure I figured out how to fix it. I was having this problem a bunch, and at first I though my it was just a bug, but it still hasn't been fixed. I discovered that the problem is caused when you don't have the song in your icloud music library, so it can't sync with any other device. Turns out, if you have a decent amount of songs on your device, only about half of them go to your iCloud music library. But, if you go on the playlist and hit edit, then turn off shared playlist, then it seems to keep whatever songs you throw on it afterwards. That fixed it for me, at least.

Thank you! Thank you! You helped me save the day for my daughter. She did exactly what you said to do and all her music reappeared. She was so happy as previously doing an update from an old iphone to a new, and following their directions, she lost 10,000 pictures and all her music. Apple could not fix that problem. So thank you. It could have been a sad day for her.

just adding to the list. My songs keep disappearing and I keep adding them. I'm so frustrated with Apple streaming.

Thanks!

Hello every time I upgrade to a NEW IOS , my songs disappear ! , and I have to press the cloud with the downward arrow for every artist all over again , or my songs get blocked. Just because I upgrade to a new ios, why ?, should I have to go through the pain of re downloading all songs all over again? This has been happening for multiple generations of iPhone .Selecting manually manage music, should not mean the stuff that you have on your phone should disappear all together? I have a feeling they are doing this to pressure people to just subscribe to Apple Music.

Some marketing ******* thought, " Ok, just make people download form the cloud over and over again for songs they own, that way they see how great and easy Apple Music is! " Then they will all subscribe.Making people lose their music on a firmware download is something that a very weak crappy company does, not something that Apple does. Heck , if Microsoft did this it would be all over the tech blogs. Apple has not improved anything since steve jobs died.

1. Spotlight search and indexing is terrible, you can't search any file by wildcard extension . IE , *.ppt, *.doc, *.docx, *.xls , would give you every spreadsheet etc. there is on windows, it doesn't on a Mac. I mean search for "document" in Finder does not cut it. People should not have to download third party software for search.

2. Iphone is not a joy to use anymore, especially with a big issues like disappearing music. This should never happen on a product like this.

Apple is acting like Microsoft of the 90's . It thinks its invincible.

Same here with 12.4.0.119,

last backup from 20.May was okay, 1 week vacation, than yesterday i added a new playlist with 1 new song and my iPhone most songs again.

I needed to go, so i stopped syncing and than those songs were missing (i have approx 100 playlists, working as a fitness instructor).

On iPhone AND OSx. SICK! On iPhone even the songs were missing, on OS X the songs were there, but they were removed from the playlists, unrecognizable which playlist was complete or not.

My time machine backup seemed to rescue me, the iTunes started, had all songs except the new added in it, synced: fine.
But than i synced again and now it is synchronizing a lot of songs and videos AGAIN - i got some new playlists duplicate and the songs on the iPhone are "grayed" , not available, but seem to sync now....

+1300 Songs were affected, at least , as they are being copied now.

C'mon apple. This bug is +1 year old, at least some reported same behavior. #Serious? For me (fitness professional) this is something i cannot accept, if i didn't have my wives phone as a backup, i would have not been able to be in my class on time. A situation very uncomfortable , costs me money and reputation. And a LOT OF MY TIME.....

I had the same issue as well. I don't know how to get your playlists back but for future reference when you sync your iPhone to your computer just go to your phone's "summary" page, scroll down to options and check the box that says "manually manage music and videos". This should stop your playlists from getting altered or deleted.

This is still an ongoing, frustrating problem with no solution in sight.

I feel your pain! as a Dj I have 100's of playlists and this was seriously messing my lists up!

I found a workout and actually created a tutorial on how to get around this. It won't fix iTunes removing files from manual playlists (I'm not sure you actually can) but gives you some tips on how to create better protected playlists!

http://ontheriseacademy.com/djs-itunes-deleting-songs-playlists/

Good luck!