Apple Music Service - most exasperating

This has to be the most unbelievable screw up I've seen with any music service anywhere.

Finally signed up for the 3 month free trial yesterday.

It took over 30 minutes of signing out of my AppleID and back in, quitting iTunes and restarting it, restarting the computer multiple times just to even get a single song to play. Don't have a clue what I did that got it to start working yesterday. Once I did, I was able to add about 24 albums to my library and download them - very quickly - we're talking 15-20 seconds max to download an album.

Once again this morning, I've been sitting here for over half an hour.
Waited patiently for it to finish the iCloud Music syncing, Signed out and back in, quit and restarted iTunes, restarted the computer and nothing.

All the startup pages load quick as lightening under each category.
Artist searches return results very fast. But,...

Not a single one of the playlists under the "For You" heading will play - they just sit there loading for minutes at a time.

Not a single song selection from anywhere will actually play.

Go into the "New" tab which is where you can find and search for the artists you want.

Find an artist and an album you want to add, click the + sign and it changes to a check mark - go check out My Music and it's not there, go back to the album still sitting there in the "New" tab and the check mark has changed back to the + sign again.

Beats 1 doesn't work either - every other radio station plays, but not Beats 1.

Everything works great except for actually playing any music.

I give up.

edit:
Ok, so I didn't give up.
Restarted the computer yet one more time.
Voila, I can now play my selections, but...

Still cannot add anything to My Library via either of the 2 options for doing so.
All of my playlists have now been duplicated - and I only have a single playlist that is not there by default.

For me, the issue has been the lack of intuitiveness. Technically speaking, I don't seem to have some of the issues you do (for example, Beats 1 loads but that's not always a good thing because the programming is terrible every time I open it) but using it can be quite frustrating. For a company that makes things that are often quite easy to use, this is a notable lapse in design. I've had people ask me what Apple Music is and for those who have no interest, it makes accessing your local collection annoying (honestly, I should be able to set my collection as the default, not AM). I appreciate that this is a "1.0 release" but it needs some input from someone who has no understanding of UI design to point out how difficult it is to navigate sometimes (I'm looking at you as well Google Play Music...).

Pulled out my iPhone to check it out. The album I added via iTunes this morning has been added to My Library there, but still not showing in iTunes.

So, tried quitting and restarting iTunes again.

This time, all the albums I added to my library yesterday were missing.
Went into Preferences:
'Show Apple Music' was checked - you'd think that's what you need to see your Apple Music albums - they are all downloaded and stored in my iTunes library.
'iCloud music library' had mysteriously become unchecked all on it's own. Re-checked that one and they all appeared again. Except the one I added this morning, which was added via iTunes and has been added to my library on the phone.

LOL, looks like you're a beta tester for the new Apple Music Service. I spent about 3 hours late last night downloading updates for the Office 2016 Preview and then El Capitan. I was going to try out the new Apple Music Service but after reading your comments, I think I'll wait for some updates to it first.

Since it appeared it was adding to my library based on what I saw on the phone, decided I'd look up some of my old vinyl Windham Hill collection that I no longer have and keep adding stuff. I'd add one and go check My Library and nothing. The 5th album I added, the first 4 showed up with it. Additional albums are showing up right away. I have done nothing further to get it working.

But now, 2 hours later, it appears to be functioning as it's supposed to. Let's see what happens the next time I go to use it.

Ok, so I got 6 albums added and downloaded.

Now when I select an album, the whole page populates... except for the song titles, and not a single song will play any longer.

And just to see if the problem was on my side, here's my speedtest:

..

Restarted iTunes... and working again now.

Sounds really buggy. Thanks for all the reports! I will hold off a bit!

I almost signed up for this as well but held off after some comments I saw about damage to iTunes libraries. The ones I read suggest that the corruption was due to something going wonky between Music Match and Apple Music.

You gus might find this series of threads interesting/helpful. Only a few contributors to the forum so far but the information seems to be good and getting off to a good start as a community.

Well, I didn't sign up for the free trial or the paid-forever option and I'm neither an Apple "fanboy" nor a knee jerk "something's gone wrong, must be Apple's fault" guy.

But I did update iTunes (and iOS) and found that iTunes Match has disappeared or been renamed — I don't mind what it's called — but my playlists in iTunes have been messed around a bit. One of them simply vanished. Or rather, the playlist was still there, but empty! Worse, when I repopulated that particular playlist, on syncing to iPhone, it again disappeared, that is the music did, the playlist being again shown but empty. This happened 3 times. In the end, I created a new playlist of similar name and it's okay.

However, what I find is that if I remove a playlist from the syncing option to iPhone, it empties the same playlist on my iMac.

So, I'm less than completely happy with this upgrade; iTunes and iOS 8.4.

I await developments with optimism. Hope I'm not let down.

Ian

Well, it quit working about 10 minutes after my last post above, so I gave up for awhile.

Been back in it for 15 minutes now.
Apple Music would not play any music again.
Quit and restarted iTunes.
Now it will play the songs.
Will not add anything to My Library.

I had deleted all the duplicated default playlists earlier this morning.
They are all duplicated... again.

First thing I did after signing up yesterday was to add a recommended Elvis playlist.
I never was able to get a single song to play from that playlist so I deleted it.
After this last restart of iTunes, Apple Music decided to add it back.

Meanwhile in Playlists:
Went to look at the "Recently Added" and "Recently Added1" and what do you know, the album I just added is there in both of those lists.

You know, the one that is not in Recently Added nor in All Albums nor any other category in My Library. Yeah, I went back just to double check.

Figured I might as well see if it would download from the playlist and it does.
Downloading it from the playlist added it to All Albums in My Library but it's still missing from Recently Added there.

Go figure.

OUCH!!! And I think I'll just stay with basic Mavericks etc. and it's saying I have some updates to do including an updated iTunes 12.x I've told it to ignore. I don't need any of its " new features and improvements" thanks.

Updates:

Solved the duplicating playlists by deleting the original default playlists and then renaming the duplicated ones to take the 1 off the end of them.

Had an iTunes update waiting when I got home from work Monday. Adding new albums and downloading has been functioning since then with the following exceptions.

Quite a few albums I've added will be missing 3-4 songs. Let's just "assume" that's because they don't have the rights to those songs. There are 2 separate scenarios here.

The first, when in Album view (which is where I live), the Album will have a cloud icon on it indicating there are downloads available. Clicking the icon does nothing - opening the Album reveals songs that are grayed out and cannot be played. If you want to play those songs, you're going to have to go back and do a search for the album again - they are playable there.

The second, when in Album view there is no cloud icon - you would be thinking this indicates you've already downloaded all the songs right? You would be wrong. Upon opening the Album, you'll find several songs missing (as in they are not even listed) and a "Show Complete Album" button. Clicking that button reveals the rest of the songs in the album - not greyed out. You can double click on any of them and they will play via streaming. There are a total of 4 options for adding those songs to your library: 1) an "ADD" button next to the song, 2) a cloud icon now appears on the Album cover, 3) an "Add All Songs" button, and 4) clicking on the "..." next to the song title reveals an "Add to My Music" option. None of those 4 options will add any of those songs to your music library.

Below are pics of both scenarios.

Another nit pick - the date of albums - quite few of them download with dates that are at least 25-35 years after the 1st time I bought the album. If you want to set up a playlist setup by year or decade, you're going to have edit a fair many of them. Just started editing some of those this morning. The edit seems to hold after quitting and restarting iTunes, but don't know if that will hold over time or if the service will change it back. Rather just give us the original issue date of an album.

As an exercise, went looking for the 2 albums above plus James Gang Rides Again this morning. The James Gang album is not available in Apple Music but you can purchase it for $6 in the iTunes store. You can also purchse the CD for $5 from Amazon and get free mp3 version. At that price, surely the album is not still selling well enough to continue witholding it from the streaming services and at least get some cash out of it.

Spotify - All 3 of these albums in their entirety are available and can be added to your music.

Rdio, well Rdio just moved into the "it sucks" column. 2 of the 3 albums are available there, but, fully 40% of all the music I have previously added to my library there is now Unavailable.

Only 2 arttists that I've actually searched for and are not available via streaming anywhere are Garth Brooks and King Crimson. Come on Robert, please... it's time to move into the 21st century. Anyone that knows your music wants the full album.

Update to post # 13.

The first scenario above with songs just grayed out - went ahead and deleted that CS&N album, then went back and added it to My Library again. This time it added and downloaded the 3 songs that were grayed out and unplayable in the pic above. But this time, it left song # 6 as in the second scenario (save you from looking, previously it was missing songs 1, 5 & 11).

The second scenario above:
Had 1 album where after the 4th or 5th click to Add that song to my library, the add button changed to a cloud and then downloaded. That album and 1 more, I was able to add all songs by double clicking in the Add All Songs button (not double tapping), waiting for 30 seconds to a minute when the cloud icon would then appear. Spent 4-5 minutes per album on those 2 tapping and clicking with all sorts of methods to get those complete albums.

The 3rd one I tried (an Enya album) had 4 songs missing and after 5 minutes, I had no success in adding any of those songs. Went ahead and deleted the album, then went back to add it again. This time it put all but one song in my library - which was not one of the previous 4 that had been missing. No amount of tapping/clicking will get it to add that song.

This is just a pile of hurt.

I'm sorry you're having so many issues. Oddly enough, the main thing NOT giving me any issues so far is Apple Music -- I'm listening to (and greatly enjoying) about five hours a day of perfectly-pitched playlists and suggested albums in the "For You" section mainly. I have saved a few songs for later playing, but I haven't added much from the service to my music collection.

I am having issues with the iTunes database corrupting itself, even with the update. It's not a huge deal for me because I have a backup of the pre-12.2 iTunes version I can pull an old copy of the iTunes Library.itl file to replace the messed-up one, and everything's back to hunky dory for a while. But only for a while.

This clearly should not be happening, and I hope Apple has people on overtime trying to fix it. But Apple Music, taken separately of the iTunes OS X issues (as one might on an iOS device) -- has been fantastic.

Took a look at iTunes this evening - all the Apple Music was missing.
iTunes had not been shut down since last use.

Went back into Preferences and iTunes had decided to uncheck iCloud Music Library all on it's own again.

FYI: Once that item is unchecked or you log out of iTunes, you have no access to any of the Apple Music even if you have downloaded it all. You can be disconnected from the internet and play your downloaded tracks.

Re-checked it - all the Apple Music is back after it finishes syncing.

All the default playlists are duplicated yet again.

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On another note: I did find by deleting an album that refuses to add all the songs, then instead of adding the album to My Music - add it to a playlist, the entire album could be added that way, although you're going to need to click on the cloud for each individual song to download it there. The album would then appear in My Music, but does not appear in any of the Recently Added views.

Here's a new issue - Apple Music's wonderful "wide array" of new music. If only I could find Dr. Dre's new album.

for those you are having problems whit losing radio station like I had and other things make sure you go to ITunes preferences and make sure that show apple music and iCloud music library are check it fix my problems so far

vansmith said:

Here's a new issue - Apple Music's wonderful "wide array" of new music. If only I could find Dr. Dre's new album.

Click to expand...

What the %$#@& is THAT supposed to be???

Is that Jony Ive's new slimmed idea as to how Apple Music should look and work????