How does apple music offline playlist work?

I have been using apply music on my iphone. I have some playlists and did make them available offline. But I still realise my LTE usage this month is quite high. So I am wondering how this works? If I can go out and leave my wifi zone, will it be automatically changed to offline mode. How can I make sure that Apple Music will only play my downloaded music offline rather than streaming.


This is very confusing. At least Spotify has a Offline Mode button.


Thanks

iPhone 6, iOS 8.4.1

Posted on Aug 15, 2015 1:55 AM

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7 replies

Aug 15, 2015 7:47 AM in response to wiccy47

What you have to do to make sure that you are only playing your "offline music" is scroll to the top of the My Music page (where it says Songs, Albums, All Playlists - depending on what you are showing on your screen), tap the Songs/etc and a drop down menu will open the last option is Show Music Available Offline. Turn that ON (it turns green). Then the only songs/albums shown will be those you actually made available for Offline Listening. And the app will only select from those - assuming you do not switch to another tab like Radio or For You.

Aug 15, 2015 3:36 PM in response to Pauliine

Hi.

Well I have used Apple Music for two weeks. For me it seems the offline mode works at random times. I've done as described above. The app shows both whole playlists and albums as downloaded (and under settings the music apps takes over 7GB) but i music do not play. Suddely today all my music stopped working, Apple music gave me the following message: "Go to settings and turn off iCloud sound libary to remove all songs from Apple Music".


Is there some kind of workaround or is it best to wait until Apple patches the bug?


Thank you.


Jonas

Aug 15, 2015 4:43 PM in response to Pauliine

Well - the way it is supposed to work is the songs/albums/playlists you select as "make available for offline" are supposed to download to your iPhone or other device. This download process seems - at least in my experience - very hit or miss. Smaller playlists - like the ones suggested in For You - seem to have less problems than larger ones or ones you create yourself. (Though the smallest ones I have self created are around 100 songs and they are selected randomly as a Smart Playlist so perhaps that is the problem.) Sometimes all the songs will be downloaded, sometimes I will get various error messages - usually the "Looks like this is not available anymore" which seems strange as most of the songs are my own songs, sometimes I will get 97, 98 out of the 100 songs (like the playlist I did today).

But they are stored in your iPhone until you again tap those three dots and tap remove downloads. Then they will be removed from your iPhone's memory. You can also go into Settings/General/Usage and delete the music from there, not sure what effect if any that will have on the way the Music app displays what is available or not.

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How does apple music offline playlist work?

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