2 iPhone restores later, it's clear: iTunes + iOS no longer viable for music

Question

2 iPhone restores later, it's clear: iTunes + iOS no longer viable for music

It's well-known that copying music from iTunes to an iOS device has become unreliable. Beware, because failures can cause so much damage that the Music app will no longer launch, that all in-use storage will be marked as "Other", and that certain Settings pages will no longer open. After my second full iPhone restore, I won't risk storing music on my iPhone ever again.

To others who have experienced sync failures: have you or Apple ever found a root cause? I have found one: a bad memory reference by the iOS Media Library Daemon. (For non-technical readers, a "daemon" is a program that runs all the time, accomplishing something useful behind-the-scenes.)

Background

Systems: iPhone 7 Plus 256 GB, latest iOS; Mac mini 2014, latest MacOS and iTunes; original Apple USB-to-Lightning cable, plugged directly into the Mac mini

Configuration: Manually manage music; 50 GB of Apple Lossless and AAC 320 tracks, imported from CDs using iTunes

What Happened

While copying music from my iTunes library to my iPhone, watching progress both at the top of the iTunes window on my Mac and in Music > Downloads on my iPhone, I noticed that the Music app had crashed. The sync spinner near the top left of the iPhone screen continued to turn, iTunes continued to report that files were being copied, but the Music app would not restart, and the song count in Settings > General > About would get stuck "Loading...". After iTunes had glibly gone through the list of files, it got stuck "Waiting for items to copy" (over 2 hours!). I finally canceled the sync in iTunes, then ejected the iPhone and power-cycled it.

Now, when I launch the Music app, it crashes and immediately returns to the home screen. Ditto for Settings > General > About (those pesky song counts and storage statistics!), Settings > General > iPhone Storage, and Settings > Music. iTunes sees the iPhone, but reports all in-use storage as "Other". Clicking "Back Up Now", does nothing, and "Sync" is greyed out. Toggling a setting such as "Sync with this iPhone over Wi-Fi" and clicking "Apply" also does nothing.

What I Tried

I restored from a backup, via iTunes. The iPhone came back, but with the same problems. I used Restore Mode with the so-called software update option (not an really an update, because the phone already had the latest iOS release) to reset the phone to factory condition. This is the option that requires the 3 GB download, and overwrites the phone's firmware and operating system software. Only then did apply my backup. Copying music failed again at a random point.

Apple Support might have insights, I thought. Before contacting them, I took a look at the spyware/"phone home" facility that Apple builds in to its systems. I AirDropped reports from Settings > Privacy > Analytics > Analytics Data from the iPhone to my Mac mini. Crash reports labeled "medialibraryd", "JetsamEvent", "Music", and "Preferences" had timestamps that corresponded either to the moment when the sync aborted, or to subsequent attempts to open the Music app or the Settings pages. And there was the smoking gun: a bad memory reference by the iOS Media Library Daemon!

I'm a computer scientist with 20 years' experience; bad memory references are a typical bug, indicative of low-quality software. (There's also a possibility that bad RAM or bad flash memory in my iPhone led to such a result.) Apply Support lacked sufficient expertise to help. "Mark" asked me if I'd tried restoring/resetting the phone. "Kimberly", a higher-level associate, had nothing to add. I wasted 27 minutes in chat, and while they were consulting their references, I looked up the cost of an out-of-warranty iPhone repair at a US Apple Store. Why would I spend $349 and 5 business days, to have a technician take a look just in case the RAM or the flash memory is bad?

This was my final Apple purchase. When I replace this phone, it will be with two devices: one to serve as a cell phone, the other to serve as a portable music player.

Crash report from Settings > Privacy > Analytics > Analytics Data

medialibraryd-2017-10-15-162751.ips:

{"app_name":"medialibraryd","app_version":"","bug_type":"109","timestamp":"2017- 10-15 16:27:51.53 -0700","os_version":"iPhone OS 11.0.3 (15A432)","incident_id":"B8B45886-81C3-4AD4-9C8E-1CCC3E51A9E1","slice_uuid":"e7 6c0993-f3d5-3b91-b250-c8ab7e71b178","build_version":"","is_first_party":true,"sh are_with_app_devs":false,"name":"medialibraryd"}

Incident Identifier: B8B45886-81C3-4AD4-9C8E-1CCC3E51A9E1

CrashReporter Key: b6af6c5675aa9fdf9dfff493516608075cba5338

Hardware Model: iPhone9,2

Process: medialibraryd [120]

Path: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MusicLibrary.framework/Support/medialibraryd

Identifier: medialibraryd

Version: ???

Code Type: ARM-64 (Native)

Role: Unspecified

Parent Process: launchd [1]

Coalition: com.apple.medialibraryd [197]

Date/Time: 2017-10-15 16:27:51.4769 -0700

Launch Time: 2017-10-15 11:56:13.9735 -0700

OS Version: iPhone OS 11.0.3 (15A432)

Baseband Version: 3.00.00

Report Version: 104

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)

Exception Subtype: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0002000100fb0cf0

VM Region Info: 0x2000100fb0cf0 is not in any region. Bytes after previous region: 562946211777777

REGION TYPE START - END [ VSIZE] PRT/MAX SHRMOD REGION DETAIL

MALLOC_NANO (reserved) 00000001d8000000-00000001e0000000 [128.0M] rw-/rwx SM=NUL ...(unallocated)

--->

UNUSED SPACE AT END

...

iPhone 7 Plus, iOS 11.0.3, 256 MB

Posted on Oct 17, 2017 12:33 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 17, 2017 1:05 PM in response to turingtest2

Thanks for the suggestion. I appreciate that you took the time to read through my message.

A lot of users have reported problems with sync when a music library contains purchased songs plus songs copied from CDs. In my case, there were no purchased songs in the iTunes library or on the device. After the first full iPhone restoration, I created a completely new library in iTunes as a precaution, and of course the iPhone no longer contained songs of any kind.

iTunes and iOS are not reliable enough to support large collections of music copied from CDs. Today, the typical iPhone user has perhaps a hundred AAC-128 songs, bought in the iTunes Store app on the device -- or dispenses entirely with a "collection" and just streams the popular song of the hour from Apple Music, with lossy AAC-256 compression, on a $10/month rental basis. My collection spans 25 years, includes almost 1,000 CDs, and consists of lossless and AAC-320 versions of each track.

It was silly of me to expect a smart phone to be a music platform. I dusted off my 2007 iPod Classic 160 GB this morning, downloaded and restored its software via iTunes (57 MB, compared to 3 GB of bloat for iOS 11!), and successfully copied the same set of files that had twice brought a 2016 iPhone 7 Plus to its knees!

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Answer 2

Oct 18, 2017 2:33 PM in response to MyFinalApplePurchase

Because there are so many reports of iTunes/iOS music sync failures, both within the Apple Support Communities and in other online forums, I thought I'd add more context.

If Apple were inclined to fix music sync, the way to do it would be to expose the music library as a folder. All non-Apple cell phones and portable music players (still a category in the market, I discovered) work like external drives when plugged in to a computer by USB. All digital cameras also work this way, exposing the infamous DSC01 folder!

File systems, and file transfer over USB, are solved problems. The supporting software isn't perfect, but technology for rolling back failed operations (journaling) has existed for decades and would be sufficient unto itself if we could access the file system directly. Better yet, there would be no need for a proprietary application like iTunes to sit in front of the music files on the device. Apple would probably write a buggy custom indexer, but if that gagged on a large collection, the user could still listen to the music by navigating the folder hierarchy.

iTunes and iOS have both grown horribly bloated. Removing music sync and exposing (part of) the file system would be a great way to reduce complexity and increase reliability. iTunes would simply be a venue for buying tracks from the iTunes Store and managing a music library on a Mac or PC. Users could copy pre-owned music files from the iTunes Media folder to a corresponding folder on their iOS devices, via USB. (You might also let iOS pick up files from an iCloud Drive folder.) There's no need to move purchased music files around, because the purchase rights are stored with one's Apple ID, and the songs be downloaded directly to any Apple device.

The latest iTunes release was a small step in the right direction, as it jettisoned useless, non-music features such as management of apps on iOS devices (just use the App Store app on the device itself!).

I am really curious whether Apple cares enough to acknowledge problems with iTunes/iOS music sync.

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Answer 3

turingtest2

Level 10

274,540 points

Oct 17, 2017 12:22 PM in response to MyFinalApplePurchase

You could try the advice here Re: medialibraryd misuse at line errors, which suggests it might be an issue related to automatic downloads of past purchases.

tt2

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