Some songs on iPhone won't play now

Question

Some songs on iPhone won't play now

Suddenly some songs on my phone will not play. These are ripped songs that have been in my iTunes library for eons. I have an iPhone 5s and recently updated to iOS 10.2. I do not subscribe to Apple Music or use iTunes Match. I am looking at the list on my phone that states "Showing only music on this iPhone." The affected songs show in my list but when selected play some other random song. There is no download button and no error message when I choose the song. I suspect that some of the songs might have been originally added to my library through Home Sharing, but that's not the case with all of them. This doesn't even affect all songs in a given album. Some songs in an album will play while others will not. I've searched this and other forums, but don't find my exact circumstances in relation to this issue, so I'm hoping someone might have a clue.

EDIT: If I ask Siri to play the songs in question, they will play!

Message was edited by: Diane Wordsmith

iPhone 5s, iOS 10.2, null

Posted on Dec 29, 2016 10:05 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

sterling r

Community Specialist

Dec 30, 2016 1:41 PM in response to Diane Wordsmith

Greetings Diane Wordsmith,

Thank you for using Apple Support Communities.

I see that all of a sudden some of the songs on your iPhone won't play. These are ripped songs that have been in iTunes for a long time. I definitely want to make sure that you can play these songs without any issue. I'm happy to help.

It sounds like the Music app isn't responding like it should when you try to play these songs from the app. It's good that they are playing when you ask Siri but they should also play from the Music app and not play a random song. I suggest force closing the Music app and restarting your iPhone using the steps in these articles:

Force an app to close on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch
Restart your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch

Additionally, you mentioned that some of these songs might have been originally added through Home Sharing. Please take a look at this article for assistance:

Get help with Home Sharing for iTunes libraries

Let us know if you still have the issue after this.

Cheers.

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Answer 2

Dec 30, 2016 1:51 PM in response to sterling r

Thanks for the info, sterling r. I should have stated that I tried powering down the phone and relaunching the Music app with no success. But ... it appears that invoking to Siri to play one of the affected songs has suddenly "awakened" something in my library. All of the songs will now play.

The only other thing I did was open iTunes on all of our user accounts on every computer in the house and then viewed the shared libraries on my phone. (I've never done that before and can't recreate it right now, so I'm not sure on exactly what I did.) I tapped the icon next to the shared libraries, so maybe that did something? I'm not sure. At any rate, things seem to be working now.

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