Apple Music Offline -- "This item cannot be downloaded"

This happened to me too

I bought an anime ost but some music won't be downloaded on my iPhone after I added them to the iTunes library as they should be automatically being in apple music library,,,I have been seeing the same error until I I imported the two songs again from the CD with iTunes Plus Setting and after that they worked fine,,, It should be something with the file itself sometimes if you downloaded or brought from somewhere else ,,,I haven't noticed this happens with apple music though!!!

I was also on the phone with Apple support for about an hour yesterday. All of their "solutions" were things I had already tried so, in frustration, I hung up. I really hope they fix this problem soon, because I can't listen to 9/10 of my music library. Does no one have a solution to this problem? Are we at the mercy of Apple?

Hi, did you finally rebuild all your glitched library ? I've been having a lot of issues today with apple music, and after a while I decided to reinstall the 12.2 version (instead of the last update 12.2.1) and the last problem that I have is the same that you have : for an unknown reason, I can't download a part of my previous songs, but if I delete them and add them again, it works perfectly (and I can't determine why some of them can be downloaded and others can't). Only problem is that I have a LOT of songs and I don't really have the time to do it all again.

So if you had an idea or if the technician you called you back to update you on this subject, could you let me know ?

Thank you very much.

I somehow got my iPhone in a state where half of my library wouldn't download. I'd just get the "unable to download" error for many songs I'd previously downloaded and were no longer local. I'd switched off iCloud Music Library, switched it back on, and made sure all music was no longer on my phone. I couldn't even stream them from Apple music. Nothing fixed it until I removed the offending songs from my library and re-added them from Apple music. Then they'd download.

Obviously with an over 3000 song library this isn't a solution that will work so I dug in to the media folder with iExplorer.

My fix ended up being this:

1) Back up the phone. Also in iTunes run: File-Devices-Transfer Purchase to make sure purchases are synced to your computer hard drive. Make sure to also export your photos for safe keeping. Alternatively you can copy the DCIM directory to your hard drive manually using iExplorer.

2) Disable iCould Music Library (on the iPhone under settings-Music.)

3) Open up iExplorer and connect the phone.

4) In iExplorer look at your phone (device) and under it you'll see "Media." Select Media.

5) There is a directory "Purchases." Delete it (or at least everything in the directory.) This director appears to contain a cache of all of your offline downloads. Apparently what was in there and what the database thought was in there got out of sync.

6) For safe measure, I reboot the phone. The OS will re-build missing directories on boot if it needs to.

7) Turn on iCloud Music Library, allow it to load, then try downloading your music. It should work.

* DO NOT DELETE the "Downloads" directory. It contains a database file of your app updates. If you delete this file you won't be able to do OTA app updates until you've done a backup>factory reset>restore from backup.

I actually worked this in reverse. I took everything off my phone (in iTunes I unsynced everything and offloaded my photos.) Then I deleted everything in the media folder EXCEPT "Downloads" and "Purchases." I noticed it didn't fix the problem so I then deleted "Purchases" and it did fix the problem. Note, doing iTunes will ask you to set the iPhone up as a new phone when you connect it. It's not a bad way to "nuke everything" when the stuff hits the fan (delete everything in Media except for Downloads.)
Just never never delete "Media/Downloads" or you'll have to do a factory reset/restore from backup to fix it. And that requires you to have to re-scan fingerprints and re-setup Apple Pay.

Simply deleting "purchases" should do it.

iExplorer is here https://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/

This isn't without risks so please back up everything.

This is helping -- however, I have thousands of small files in that directory and it's taking FOREVER to remove everything from the "Purchases" subdirectory. Did you notice the same issue?

Hello;

I had the same problem, researching and testing solutions, I started to play songs from my list one by one, first tried the songs Apple Music, so discover several not reproduced and displayed the message, delete them from my library and I went back to add, and then went back to add to my list, I could request them offline,

in my case this was a solution.

wilcofan33 wrote:

This is helping -- however, I have thousands of small files in that directory and it's taking FOREVER to remove everything from the "Purchases" subdirectory. Did you notice the same issue?

Yes, it can be a slow process. I'm sorry I forgot to mention that. I've just gotten so used to the way this works with iExplorer that it's not something I think to mention. Depending on what you're trying to delete, it can take 20 minutes or so. I've also had iExplorer crash when attempting this which doesn't help.

So anyone planning to do this, give yourself a half hour to work on it.

IExplorer seems to scan the entire directory, then deletes each file one by one (it does it quickly, there are just a lot of files) rather than do the equivalent of a a single OS command that removes the directory.

I don't know of that's a technical limitation or a software implementation thing. I also don't know if there is better software out there to do this.

Also if you do stuff on the phone directly, disconnect and reconnect so that iExplorer re-scans the directory structure. It caches.

It's a tool that worked for me. I agree that the speed is inconvenient.

Fingers are crossed, Gonna try this when I get home tonight.

It worked for most songs, but not all of the Apple music I've added since 8.4 came out. Really hoping for an update to at least squish a few bugs.

First when Apple Music was released, I added 770 albums to My Music with my MacBook. It was great. Downloaded them all to my mac, together with a few CDs I've imported long time ago. I purchased iTunes Match, so I could upload or match the albums that was not available in Apple Music, for later to retrieve on other items. Finally! This was all I've been waiting for.

Later I turned on my iPhone 6+, started to synch. I realised that almost half of my albums did not play on my iPhone: "This item cannot be downloaded".

I deleted a few albums that was not playable/"This item cannot be downloaded". Added them again, and suddenly everything worked. So I thought, maybe that just fixes everything. Removed and added somewhat 300 albums. After a few days some started to be "This item cannot be downloaded" again. Plus some albums that used to work every time, stopped too. In a few days, 60-70% of all my music is back to "This item cannot be downloaded" again.

Synching on my iPad Air, or my iMac at work gave the "This item cannot be downloaded" message on most albums.

I'm not sure what's happening here, and after looking around the internet for answers, I can see that I'm not the only one with this problem, but as it seems, no solution. Why haven't Apple stumbled upon this during testing period before release and fixed it?

Will it ever be fixed or should I turn off Apple Music and go back to Spotify? I really don't want to do that.

It would've been great with some feedback from others about this issue.

Cheers,

I have the same issue and called support, went all the way up until they told me the engineering team at Itunes (the devs) would call me back within 1-2 business days. It's been almost 2 weeks no answer.

I have Apple Music and iTunes Match

The issue is happening on all devices so it has nothing to do with the iPhone settings or my Mac's iTunes settings but with my iCloud library.

I have deleted the songs, deleted playlists re-created, de-authorized, re-authorized, remove iCloud Library, enabled iCloud Library.... frankly I have done everything.

The problem is this, the songs work great until I add them to my playlist. But wait a minute, this only happens on songs I had on my playlist before x date because now if I add songs that weren't there before it will work.

Let's say I had the song "ABC" in my playlist and it gives me that error, if I delete it and add it again it still won't work.

But if I add the song "DEF" that wasn't in my playlist before the song will work.

Only thing I have discovered is the iCloud Status on the "Get Info" page of the songs. The ones that do not work say "Matched" and the ones that do work say "Apple Music".

Obviously my Matched songs simply cannot be played but they are not supposed to be Matched, they are supposed to be Apple Music. My guess is there a problem along those lines but I have no idea how to erase my Matched Songs from my iCloud library to reset their status and let them go back to Apple Music.

Update:

I realized that when I removed the song from my playlist, it left it in my "My Music" and thus even if I searched for it on Apple Music to add it again in my playlist, it would add the "corrupted" one from "My Music" that for some reason was set as "Matched" in its iCloud Status back in.

Steps that fixed it:

- Remove song from Playlist

- Remove song from My Music

- Search for song on Apple Music

- Add the song back to My Music / Playlist

I'm having the exact same issue, and it seems music i added after to my iCloud music library got corrupted can still be made available offline and streamed with no issue. So far the only thing that seems to solve it is to re-add my entire music library from Apple Music, since none of the solutions in this thread seemed to help, sadly. I have no idea what caused it in the first place, but hope for a fix soon, as this discourages us from having large libraries of music added from Apple Music's streaming service, because it's so tedious to re-add again, particularly in iTunes. Matched music from Itunes Match still works without any problems on my macbook and iphone and can be streamed and made available offline on both devices.