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peglegjack

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 30, 2011
436
252
Brooklyn, NY
I have a playlist that I made specifically for my Apple Watch. It has 334 songs in it. When I upgraded to Watch OS 5 and tried to sync my songs to the watch, it only synced 196 with no explanation why. What gives?
 
I already had 550 songs on my S3 LTE and have this morning added two further a playlists. I have hit a limit as it has started removing songs from previously synced albums (songs that don't feature is the latest playlist added). Settings shows that I have 1151 songs in total on my watch. I also have over 5GB free so there must be some artificially imposed limit. Never tried adding so many songs before so I don't know if this is a OS5 feature or not.
 
No one puts songs on their Apple Watch anymore? Everyone uses streaming I guess?
I certainly put music on my Watch because I don’t have an LTE model, and I prefer to run without my phone.

I’m looking forward to my non-LTE Series 4 with 16GB storage instead of 8GB. I think WatchOS 5 may be a bit more conservative in reserving space on the Watch when it decides how much music will fit.
 
So I think I kind've figured some of it out. I have the Series 3 (GPS Only) which only has 8GB (Really wish it had 16GB though). On my watch, 2GB is the max amount of tracks you can put on it, and the option for choosing between the number of songs or the max GB of songs seems to have disappeared. Also, I believe my songs are in a higher bit rate, so I could possibly put more on the watch by changing it to 128 kbps in iTunes, though I'm a little hesitant right now.

But the real kicker seems to be that when I updated the OS to Watch OS 5, Apple automatically synced a lot of podcasts to my watch. Which podcasts are fine, but I haven't decided whether I want to put them on my watch or not. But when those podcasts were synced, it significantly lowered the capacity for how many songs I could have loaded onto it. So the number of tracks on my watch went from 334 to 193. When I removed the Podcasts, the tracks went back up to 334.

The worst part is that I still have 1.8 GB free (all stock applications), and I can't use that for music or podcasts. So until anything changes, I suppose this is the reality.

I wonder if 3rd party podcast apps are the same way?
 
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I wonder if 3rd party podcast apps are the same way?
I don't think so. I use iCatcher, and I haven't noticed songs being pushed off when I sync podcasts.

The stock Podcasts app is terrible, so I don't even have it on my phone. I tested it again during the iOS 12 and WatchOS 5 betas, but I deleted it again in short order.
 
I don't think so. I use iCatcher, and I haven't noticed songs being pushed off when I sync podcasts.

The stock Podcasts app is terrible, so I don't even have it on my phone. I tested it again during the iOS 12 and WatchOS 5 betas, but I deleted it again in short order.

Yeah I just deleted it. Just downloaded Overcast, may try iCatcher afterwards.
 
I don't think so. I use iCatcher, and I haven't noticed songs being pushed off when I sync podcasts.

The stock Podcasts app is terrible, so I don't even have it on my phone. I tested it again during the iOS 12 and WatchOS 5 betas, but I deleted it again in short order.

What's bad about the stock Podcast app? I was looking forward to that!
 
Well I downloaded OverCast and synced a podcast to my watch. As soon as I did that my song count went from 334 to 324. So I thinking this is for every podcast app? I would try iCatcher, but I don't know if I want to drop money for it to do the same thing.

The fact of the matter is yes, I could delete 100 or so songs and be ok. But why should I have to? Especially when I have almost 2 GB of free space? Apple can't carve out separate space for podcasts? They don't do this for the iPad or iPhone, why should it be applied here?
 
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What's bad about the stock Podcast app? I was looking forward to that!

I subscribe to 34 podcasts in iCatcher. For some I download every episode automatically. For others I only download episodes selectively or stream on demand. A few podcasts I auto-load to my Watch, most I don't. Three (daily French and Spanish newscasts), I limit to keeping the two most recent episodes, because if I fall behind I don't care to listen to old news. I have a playlist of specific podcasts that I use for long bike rides. I have other playlists for specific situations.

I can't imagine managing my podcasts in the stock Podcast app.

Well I downloaded OverCast and synced a podcast to my watch. As soon as I did that my song count went from 334 to 324. So I thinking this is for every podcast app? I would try iCatcher, but I don't know if I want to drop money for it to do the same thing.

The fact of the matter is yes, I could delete 100 or so songs and be ok. But why should I have to? Especially when I have almost 2 GB of free space? Apple can't carve out separate space for podcasts? They don't do this for the iPad or iPhone, why should it be applied here?

I will have to experiment and see. At the moment, I don't have any podcasts loaded on my Watch.

I hope that I am not limited to 2 GB of music on my 16 GB Series 4. I would like to load it with 5 or 6 GB of music.
 
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