Apple Music issues after iOS 18 Update

In addition to some of the issues mentioned by others, the most important problem that I’m facing since iOS 18 is that the currently playing list is lost when connected to external devices (car, in my case) through USB. When starting to play a list, the songs in the currently playing list appear properly and so does the number of the song. After a while, usually when moving to the next song, the song’s number appears as 1, and the list is no longer accessed from my car's interface (latest Mercedes in my case) and therefore I can no longer move to next/previous song. I’m forced to switch to Bluetooth so I can move to another track, but I naturally prefer the USB as it used to provide better manipulation and quality.

Interestingly enough, the same occurs even if I switch to CarPlay! Of course in that case I can access the list through CarPlay’s interface, but in the car's dashboard the list is still lost and I can still not move through songs.

I’m having a premium Apple Music subscription and the latest updates rendered my iPhone almost unusable in one of its most important usages (since I’m traveling a lot).

I do not know if the same happens with other streaming applications (I only maintain this subscription), but I suspect this is an issue of the iOS and not of Apple Music in particular. It appears to be an issue with the iTunes Library API the iPhone is using to expose media players’ content to external devices. If I use the Apple Music app from an Android device, I don’t have this issue!

Needless to mention the issue we always had and it’s been posted tens of times: That when we reconnect to the car, what was being played is always lost and the phone switches to playing the first song from the All Songs, alphabetically. That was there always and I had to make an automation to switch back to a preferred list, which is still not a solution.

So, while for others this may seem a reason to abandon Apple Music, for me I would add it’s a reason to abandon iPhone altogether.

Useless. Releasing an update with so many bugs. Or is it a conspiracy to force us to purchase the latest phone. Been a Loyal Apple user for some time. But looks like the King is otw out.

I don't know why Apple insists on removing star ratings from the music app. Nearly every update, they take it away, realise their mistake, and re-add it in a subsequent update. JUST KEEP IT!

Over two months since the ios 18.0 disaster and no fix from Apple - crickets! They need to refund everyone with Apple Music for two months! It's a defective product!

I am wondering and waiting for the same thing. I am seriously about to drop Apple if they don't fix this. Over two months now! What are we paying for?!

I can’t scroll through my long playlists on the Apple TV app. I have a few with several hundred songs, it seems that the more songs there are the harder it is for the app to scroll through them. Have restarted the unit several times. Between this and the zoom-outs at the end of movies, this thing’s days are numbered.

On top of that, when I was trying to add songs to playlists today it would add the wrong songs!

Ever since updating to iOS 18 Apple Music has become unusable for me. Songs constantly buffer and take a while to actually start playing, if I try to skip more than three songs the app freezes, when I try to add a song to a playlist the app freezes, when I add a song to play next it skips over the song majority of the time. The app also continues to play a song even when I skipped it causing the app to freeze & when I close the app the previous song is still playing. At this point idk even know if it’s worth having Apple Music since other platforms work normally, or better than AM, at this moment.

I spent an hour (3rd time) with Tech support timing all the operations that are lagging huge related to all of this and sent in the diagnostics files, so the software guys can see the exact problem. Hopefully this will get someone's attention! I kept pointing out that I am part of this community thread with tons of people having the same issues, but they say it doesn't matter/mean anything without seeing the actual problem, i.e. the diagnostic files....sheesh! So much for Apple Community impacts!

Ever since the update, My music has beeen lagging. It’ll play the next song but then still have the title, album picture, and ending of the previous song. I am unable to add songs to my playlists for some reason. I search for a song in my playlist and instead of playing the song and continuing with my playlist, it plays the song and then plays random music outside of my playlist. Idk what this update has done. but i’m going to need them to fix this cause this is irritating me!!!!

So, has apple been getting back to anyone about this?

I have an iphone 11 running 18.0.1, and apple music has been VERY consistently borked.

When shuffling a playlist consisting of downloaded music, native on the phone, Music will crash just past 30 seconds into the first song. I restart Music, hit play, and the song picks up again at 30 seconds on the dot, and then the playist runs fine.

Until the next time i start it, in which case it crashes again in precisely the same way.

I've tried reinstalling the music app, reinstalling itunes on the computer, replacing the playlist, even reloaded my music.

Alas, nobody has answers for me.

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).

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.

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.

my phone also is having a score of difficulties, all revolving around wired sync for the music library. In order:

• Began taking far longer to complete sync, seeming to hang at the part where it gets ready to sync tracks (checked music, checked playlists, new additions to the desktop library)
• Proceeded to declare almost all of my onboard music files ineligible for playback because of region issues, for files that were *local data to the mac*
• above prompted removing all music from the phone and reuploading them, restoring my legacy music collection
• new problem: the latest dozen or so tracks appeared as present in library, but playing them would result in other songs in collection playing. Now they won't resync to phone.

mobile device: iPhone 12 Pro with iOS 18

desktop: 27" iMac 2018 with Catalina 13.7 (latest catalina update as best I can tell; hadn't upgraded yet because a friend and others online had been running into USB connnection errors)

EDIT: After deleting the tracks, removing them from the desktop library, re-adding them to the library, and trying multiple sync attempts, including having to unplug and plug the phone back into the desktop, the songs finally are back on the phone and working again.