Apple Music issues after iOS 18 Update

18.1 is available now with no pretense of affecting the music app. It’s mostly AI stuff as others predicted. I turned off automatic updates, seeing no need to update for features largely available in newer phones (I’m using an iPhone 12, putting my plans for a new one on hold indefinitely until the dust settles) and being a little gun shy now about being the first guy on the block. I’ll continue waiting for a more promising approach to addressing the problems we all are experiencing (and it continues to puzzle me that there are so many different problems being experienced by different users).

My concern is I had several custom stations I made in Apple Music radio, and they are gone. So I remade one and the apparent playlist it creates has like a handful of artists and it seems to repeat them all on a random cycle…why and I paying for that?

Did I mention the password problem? I thought it was a one off that my phone had forgotten some (but not all) of my passwords, but today it had forgotten a couple I had had to remind it about previously which it had remembered for a week or so, but it has now forgotten again. I’m not always at home near my laptop, where I can find them on Chrome, it’s starting to get annoying now 🤬

It deleted every single song I had downloaded that’s 3 years worth, and when I try to redownload the playlists it says song is not available in my region like 8+ times and it won’t let me download it. Everything’s being really slow, and my phone keeps freezing really bad and I have the iPhone 13.

Thanks for the possible solution. The problem with Apple's bugs is that they do not affect everyone in the same way. In other words, a new update comes out and people have all sorts of issues from the update. Handfuls of people have the same issues, but not everyone else does.

I have synched my iphone and ipad pro directly with my music library now and they still come out corrupted. Some albums have triplets of the same songs while there will only be the single song (correctly) within the same album(s).

In addition, so many albums are missing a large majority of the songs even though they remain in the albums that reside on the Mac itself. You go looking for a specific song on your iphone or ipad and you notice it's not available.

I don't even bother calling Apple anymore. They act as though no one knows how to do basic troubleshooting. Of course, not everyone knows how to do it and I'm not denigrating those folks, but when I tell Apple that I have already done what they are saying to do, I don't want to do it over again.

I'm currently looking for a high end music server/streamer for my audio system that I can load all of my music on to and then hopefully use that to transfer to my ipad/iphone.

Apple's bugs sometimes cause HUGE problems, and this is one of them since music is important to me and many other folks.

Cheers and good luck.

Totally agree with ‘Oldoiler’ comment. Apple historically has the ‘take it or leave it attitude because we are smarter than you’ approach. It may be time to look for other Music Library Management options.

Very well said. They seem to have an excuse for everything, until they can’t anymore. I’ll never go back to WindBlows, but Apple isn’t making me very secure with them anymore.

I am in fact looking for a streamer/server now to replace iTunes. iTunes is taking way too much of my time these days in order to just simply listen to what I want, when I want.

Has anyone tried 18.1.1 which apparently dropped overnight? It only purports to address security issues, but I am wondering whether it might affect the Music app, either positively or negatively. I learned my lesson with iOS 18, turned off automatic updates, and will await the verdicts of those braver than I am.

18.1.1 broke my ability to synch to iTunes on Windows.

A few days ago, iTunes had a hiccup and I lost 9,000 songs on my iPhone. After hours of resynching, I got my songs back. Then I upgraded my phone to 18.1.1, then decided to synch my phone to add 50 more songs. It has been stuck for hours synching. This is ridiculous. Apple has been synching devices to iTunes for over two decades.

Forgive me if you have already tried this.

You'll notice in itunes in the upper righthand corner there is the little magnifying glass and just to the left of it is a little down arrow and three horizontal lines.

Go over to the left side and under library highlight your albums. Then go back to the little down arrow in the upper righthand side and click down to the "Sort Options" and click on it. It will give you other options to sort your albums.

If it's not there for you, then it's another one of the inconsistent bugs that affects different users in different ways.

I may completely be misunderstanding you though.

Cheers!

In my case it’s the Home Sharing. I used to see Home Sharing in the menu now I have to click the 3buttons in the upper right corner to select my iTunes library. However, after I select my music library, the button only becomes shaded.

Luckily I never update all my devices at once. My Home Sharing works fine on my iOS 17 devices

In looking more and more into my itunes library, I'm seeing that it's actually FUBAR. It has deleted a lot of songs from albums, if not all of the songs and the complete album.

In addition to that, I have some albums that I downloaded "legally" years ago from sites that were free at the time, but now are not. Bad on me for not burning those downloads to a CD for backup, because itunes has deleted all of the songs off of each album, except for one song.

Lots of people dis physical CD's in this day and age, but these itunes issues are the reason that I still buy physical CD's so that I have a concrete backup of each album. Now I'll make sure to burn downloads as well.

One more thing regarding folks that have "solved the problem". I have learned over the years that itunes, and almost anything Apple that is a bug from a certain software update does not affect everyone in the same way. So, one person's fix doesn't necessarily fix everyone's problems. I appreciate people sharing their "fixes" that worked for them, but they don't apply across the board.

Happy Holidays Everyone!

I know nothing about coding or programming, but I have noticed that there is a wide variety of problems being reported. My issues are relatively minor, just annoying…ridiculous delays when adding a song to a playlist, infrequent jettisoning of a song halfway through playback.

Others have catalogued really egregious problems. The silence from Apple about this is deafening. Some say Apple does not read these community support boards. It seems to me that, if they did, they might ponder what they screwed up that could cause such a varied distribution of diverse problems. There is no shortage of clues from which they could triangulate.

I violated my usual protocol and updated my phone to iOS 18 right away. Once I witnessed my issues, while finding nothing online initially to suggest a problem with iOS 18, but noticing the precise correlation of my issues and the upgrade, I turned off automatic upgrades on my other devices.

Yeah it's still brutally slow and takes forever to show that it's already been added to the playlist.

So obviously the latest update did nothing - one more chance for Apple to address, or I say everyone cancels their Music subscriptions. Maybe that will finally get their attention!

I cancelled my iTunes match subscription which I've had for years. I have tried everything, including syncing manually and even with a manual sync, things are just as bad. It's amazing at how bad this is. I realize my issue is not the same as yours, but I've addressed previously how Apple's bugs affect different users in different ways.

I cancelled iTunes match, because it serves no purpose now with how corrupt iTunes is.

Happy Thanksgiving