Q: iPhone is showing songs not in my iPhone.
Okay Apple guys,
So, I consider myself to be a pretty dang savvy person, especially since I work in tech support for a pretty large wireless company, however one thing that I've noticed on my iPhone lately has stumped me quite a bit.
I am an Apple Music subscriber (love the service, if you don't have it, get it!) and ever since I've started using it I've noticed that my iPhone is starting to house "ghost" songs if you will, on my device. However, they aren't in the Music app, at all.
If I go into Music and tap on "My Music" and change the category to "Only Downloaded Music" I get the "Going off the grid?" display page, that indicates that I have no music downloaded on my device, and that if I want to listen to music offline, I should download songs from Apple Music to my device for offline play (see below)
But when I go to Settings > General > About and look under "Songs" it indicates that I have 435 songs on my device. (see below)
I assumed this was like an indication of "cached" songs for quicker playback on the device when the connection is slow, or to prevent higher data usage when streaming, however when I went into Settings > Music to see if there is a way to disable cached playback, there is no option to disable or clear the cache. I also checked in Settings > General > Storage & iCloud Usage > Manage Storage > Music and there, it did show 2 songs that I guess were cached or stored on my phone, but they were songs that I've actually never listened to on my phone, and one of them was a song that I had never heard of. So I tapped on "Edit" and "Delete All Songs" and they went away. Went back and checked my "About" section to see if the song amount cleared, and it was completely unchanged.
When I connect my iPhone to iTunes, in the section that shows what is synced with the device, it doesn't so any audio files at all. I have never synced any music to my phone via iTunes. I'm unclear as to whether or not these 435 songs that my phone shows I have is taking up any of my storage on my device. I'm honestly not sure what else to try or do.
I also did a DFU via iTunes and set up as a new iPhone without signing into Apple Music, and went in and checked my "About" section after that, and it didn't so any songs at all, as soon as I signed back into Apple Music, the song count returned.
This issue occurred not only with my current phone, iPhone 6s Plus but it also happened on my iPhone 6 Plus and my first iPhone 6 when Apple Music got released. (yes, I know I go through phones pretty quickly.) So it seems the issue isn't related to the phone itself, but more so related to Apple Music.
I'm at a complete loss at this point.
Honestly, the song cont doesn't bother me at all, I don't care if it said I had 10 million songs on my phone, as long as this invalid indication of a song count isn't taking up any of my device storage space.
If any one could shed some light on the subject, it would be greatly appreciated!
iPhone 6s Plus, iOS 9.2, 64GB
Posted on Feb 15, 2016 9:46 PM