Q: Playing songs from Search results broken?
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Nov 8, 2015 7:16 PMby Kiester24,Update:
I had someone else sign in with their Apple ID and everything worked perfect for them. Considering that perhaps something could have been screwy with my iCloud Library, I deleted everything from it so I had a clean slate. I added 4 songs to My Music. Here are the steps that reproduce my issue every single time.
1 - Restart ATV
2 - Go to Music. Go to Playlists. Find Recently Added. Click and play any song. Works. Go over to Search
3 - Search for a song that I added to my library, i.e. "Downtown" by Macklemore.
4 - Check results from "All Apple Music", choose that song and click to play. It works.
5 - Check results from "My Music". Don't choose anything, just force the search against my library.
6 - Go back to "All Apple Music". Can still play song.
7 - Search for another song from "All Apple Music". Still works.
8 - Check the results from "My Music". This time, go down to the result and click to play it. Will not work.
9 - Go back to "All Apple Music". Select and click the song. This time it will not play.
10 - At this point Search is broken. Nothing I search will result in being able to play music.
11 - Go to Playlists again. Now nothing will play from there.
12 - Go to My Music or anything else to the left side of menu. Everything plays fine.
In order to get Playlists and Search (in All Apple Music) to work again, I'll have to restart. I'm convinced that this is somehow tied to my account since it worked for someone else on my ATV4. This issue must not be widespread at all because I can't find a single post about this. I have a support call scheduled for tomorrow. I'll update again if I get anywhere positive with it.
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Nov 19, 2015 7:18 AMby Kiester24,Still working through it. After a few back and forth calls, they contacted me two days ago to put my Apple ID in troubleshooting mode. I'm not really sure what that is beyond basically we set my password to something they know. My understanding is that they are going to try logging in as me on an ATV 4 and see if they get the same behavior. Assuming they do, hopefully they can pull some logs from the device to see what it's choking on. I have to admit that giving them my password feels like one of the sketchiest things I've ever done. I work in IT for a bank and all the red flags were flying. I hope to hear back soon.
Are you getting the exact same behavior as me or some variation? At first, I was always able to get the Search on My Music to work so long as it was the very first thing I did but since I started this thread, it settled into never working and ALWAYS being the trigger to causing all the other things to stop working.
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Nov 19, 2015 7:43 AMby DaveHornsby,Thanks for the update.
I'm not sure if it's exactly the same as I've tried to find out the specific steps that cause it to break and not had much luck... sometimes search seems to be broken even after a hard restart, sometimes I can search through Apple Music's music a perfectly and it's only when I switch to search my library that it breaks, other it seems to always break on the second search regardless of whether it's my music or Apple's...
But I haven't broken For You & New yet - and I can still select tracks from the Artists, Songs sections - it just seems to be Search and Playlists that break for me.
The bottom line though is that search is totally useless for me. I have a very large library and scrolling down to Yello or Zero 7 is no fun at all... I'm learning to live with it by trying to create artist specific playlists for my favourite bands and smart playlists to easily surface other stuff I might want to hear, but it's not ideal...
I've chased up support today too, so I'll update this if I find out anything else (assuming they get back to me...)
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Dec 7, 2015 11:43 AMby Kiester24,Well, the good news is that they were able to reproduce the issue. The bad news is that they confirmed it would take a TVoS update to fix whatever was wrong with it. I will not be holding my breath on that. It's not a big deal for now. I could see being more irked about it whenever Siri integration with Music happens.
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Dec 8, 2015 3:45 AMby DaveHornsby,Thanks for the update. You've got further than I have, which isn't surprising as the problem doesn't sound fixable.
Did you ever try a full reset ie. hook the AppleTV to iTunes via a USB C cable and restore from there? That's what they're trying to get me to do at the moment but I'm pretty certain it won't help (and I don't have the correct cable lying around...)
At least it's logged as a real problem I suppose, so at least it's on their radar but I wonder why it's not more widespread - what's so special about us?
Maybe Siri integration will be the answer? After all, just asking for something to be played may not invoke the search command and it certainly won't involve clicking on anything on screen...
Fingers crossed.
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Dec 8, 2015 11:54 AMby Kiester24,I never did a full restore like that. As you're figuring, I'd bet it won't help either. Considering I had consistent results with three brand new units, it had to software/account issue. What threw me off was that they couldnt reproduce the issue at all so i posted a video on Youtube so they could see I wasnt pulling their leg. After that, they came back confirming that it did the same for their own accounts too. Almost felt like perhaps they were brushing it off. I can't find anyone else that has the same problem and then they are all of a sudden able to get that behavior with multiple accounts? Suspect. Oh well. The guy I worked with was great; got in touch every few days just to keep me in the loop. Honestly, I'm more interested in knowing what "broke" things than I am all that concerned with it ever working.
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Dec 8, 2015 7:00 PMby Kiester24,Siri search works just fine. With that in mind, I probably won't bother ever searching the "old" way. The ultimate work around is basically to never search My Music.
Really happy to see that all the rumors that the Remote app was never going to work with the new ATV turned out to be wrong!
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Dec 9, 2015 1:16 AMby DaveHornsby,Same here! Searching by Siri works like a charm (mostly) once you get used to phrasing the requests properly. I haven't had a chance to search via the Remote app yet but at this point I'm so thrilled that Siri works I doubt if I'll use it anyway...
They've also added a Shuffle option to playlists too which was another thing that was bugging me - or you can just ask Siri to 'Shuffle my Best of 2015 playlist' - good stuff!
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Dec 24, 2015 12:18 AMby Dirk Lenz,Exact same issue here. This is what i found out so far. The bug occurs even after a complete restore with the latest tvOS software and set up via iPhone 5. As soon as i activate iCloud Music Library in the My Music section, music searches and For You suggestions are no longer playable. When i go to Apple TV’s settings, sign off from my iTunes and App Store account and then sign back on again (happy typing) Apple Music searches and suggestions are playable again – until i activate iCloud Music Library. A very nasty bug. Language and region setting: German btw. Happy Holidays everyone!
