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gordon1234

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 23, 2010
584
215
Has anyone ever gotten offline music downloading to work properly with iCloud Music Library or Apple Music? I’ve been an iTunes Match/Cloud Library subscriber for years now, and it has never worked properly for me. It works all right if you just have a small number of files, but if you want to download a playlist, or say, your entire music library, everything goes to hell real quickly.

Issues:
  • New to iOS 9: the “available offline” icon does not appear by songs that have been downloaded, unless you select each song individually and try to download it a second time.

  • New to iOS 9: When downloading a large playlist (1,000 songs+), the download will not start at all until you tell a second smaller playlist to also download, at which point BOTH playlists will start downloading.

  • New to iOS 9: Permanently stopping a download operation is essentially impossible. When I finally gave up on using iCloud Library at all and turned it off, it continued to populate the download queue repeatedly with seemingly random songs it decided needed downloading. clearing the queue didn’t help, nor did signing out of my Apple ID entirely AND rebooting the phone, nor did syncing my entire library over USB with iTunes. It continued to download random songs for hours and hours before eventually just stopping on its own.

  • Downloads will repeatly fail and display an error message about how such and such song could not be downloaded (with “done” and “retry” buttons). Retrying often works, but this happens constantly with larger downloads.

  • Download sometimes get “stuck” in the queue. They will never download, and cannot be canceled or removed. Restarting the entire phone seems to be the only way to remove these items from the queue.

  • Large numbers of files will get “stuck” in the queue in a somewhat lesser way. They will never download and will never display an error, but they can be canceled individually or collectively.

  • The phone will randomly delete all or a portion of downloaded songs and try to download all of them from scratch again. This usually happens if you’re trying to redownload missed songs from a partially offline playlist or album.
Every time Apple releases a major new OS, I give iTunes Match/Cloud Library another try to see if the download bugs have been fixed. iOS 7 didn’t work, nor 8, and now 9 is even more broken than the last two (and the last two were very broken).

I’m curious if anyone else has had any success downloading their entire library for offline use with these services. I did the most controlled environment possible: Clean install of iOS 9 GM, no restore from backup, no third-party apps installed. I just loaded the OS, switched on iCloud Music Library, and tried to download all my playlists.
 
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