Lifestyle

Apple Music: Broken

WHEN WILL TECH GIANT FIX IT? Ready for a first-world spleen vent? After years of keeping my vast music library on an iPod, I finally decided to give Apple Music a try this month.  I figured the service – which costs $9.99 per month ($14.99 for a family plan) after…

WHEN WILL TECH GIANT FIX IT?

Ready for a first-world spleen vent?

After years of keeping my vast music library on an iPod, I finally decided to give Apple Music a try this month.  I figured the service – which costs $9.99 per month ($14.99 for a family plan) after a free three-month trial – would be worth it seeing as I was purchasing way too many songs on iTunes.

The theory behind Apple Music is simple: Rather than buy a bunch of songs, pay a flat fee and stream the music you want to listen to.  Not only that, Apple Music lets you create playlists for you favorite bands, for specific genres … even moods.

The only downside?  The music isn’t physically stored on your device.

But, since most of the modern world is WiFi’d … I figured I’d give it a shot on my new iPhone 6s.

For a few glorious days, Apple Music was everything I’d hoped it would be (it even had the full October 2013 Pearl Jam concert I attended in Charlotte, N.C.).

I listened to a lot of David Bowie.  A lot of cheesy 80’s music.  Some grunge.  Several songs off of Muse’s two latest albums.  I even found out the name of the song on the new Honda Civic commercial (it’s “Walking on a Dream” by Empire of the Sun, by the way) and I listened to it way, way too often.

But just as I was about to go searching for Living Color’s 1988 hit “Cult of Personality,” something very uncool happened.

And is still happening …

And Apple doesn’t seem to have a clue what’s going on …

Basically, the service’s search feature is broken.  Badly.  In fact for the last three days I’ve been getting blank search screens every time I try to type in the name of a song, album or artist I’m trying to listen to.

Not good …

Other features of the service still work, but the blank search screens are a major malfunction of Apple Music’s primary utility.  They’re also incredibly annoying seeing as the autofill search function is producing the results you’re looking for – it just refuses to show them to you.

Take a look …

(Click to enlarge)

IMG_0809 IMG_0810

Yeah …

I tried a couple searches to see if the problem persisted.

It did.

Next I thought the app might be busted, so I closed out of it and reopened it.

Nope.

Then I checked for updates to the app or my iPhone software.

Nope.

Finally I restarted my phone.

Again, nothing.

The problem – referred to as “seemingly widespread” in this IBT report – persisted.  Apparently there’s a good reason for that: There is no solution.

“At the moment, there does not seem to be a fix or workaround for the issue,” the website iMore reported.

“Reboots aren’t curing it, so if you’re experiencing the problem there doesn’t appear anything you can do about it except wait for Apple to solve the problem, or switch to iTunes on the Mac where searches are working normally,” 9to5Mac added.

Not good …

Apple has yet to acknowledge the issue on its system status page. And the company’s online help doesn’t seem to be very … helpful.

Worst of all?  I still can’t stream “Cult of Personality” on my iPhone – which is pretty depressing considering I only get to listen to like five minutes of music a day between working and helping take care of my five crazy kids.

Oh well.  Hopefully Apple will acknowledge the problem soon and correct it with an upgrade of some sort.

***

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23 comments

CorruptionInColumbia February 2, 2016 at 9:45 pm

Damn Will, that seriously sucks ass. I wonder if it is but one more manifestation of the current Mercury Retrograde cycle we are in. MR screws with everything related to communication, and music is a form of communication. I hope it is back up and running, soon.

Meanwhile, maybe this will help ease the pain.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7xxgRUyzgs0

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The Colonel (R) February 2, 2016 at 9:52 pm

$70 a year for my Amazon Prime account, streaming music, videos etc plus free shipping, free storage…

Apple’s heyday is over. For the most part their stuff is over priced, over hyped with all of their best features quickly coppied by their competitors. I’ll take my Kindle over my IPAD any day of the week. The input GUI is superior and I can break the if then for what the IPad cost.

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9" February 2, 2016 at 10:34 pm

Devo’s favorite Devo album
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmBawBVBRLw

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CorruptionInColumbia February 2, 2016 at 10:37 pm

Devo “Easy Listening”????? Wow, I wasn’t prepared for that!

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The Colonel (R) February 2, 2016 at 10:38 pm

That’s bizarre, even for Devo…

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Tazmaniac February 3, 2016 at 8:14 am

Makes me think of 10cc’s early “silly music”.

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Tim Cook's coming out February 2, 2016 at 11:33 pm

” For the most part their stuff is over priced, over hyped with all of their best features quickly coppied by their competitors.”

Tim Cook’s strategery is to make the world more culturally gay so he can keep Apple’s sales up.

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Loujtanner February 3, 2016 at 4:28 am

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sparklecity February 3, 2016 at 10:07 am

Jade Helm huh???
I thought all of Texas was under “Obammer’s” evil control by now and all the Walmarts in Texas are now detention centers!!!!!

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9" February 2, 2016 at 10:15 pm

I’m old and prefer hard copies.Soundcloud and Bandcamp provide dl’s,cd’s ,lp’s,depending on the release-Spotify is a good place to sample music…
https://soundcloud.com/cleopatra-recs/living-colour-cult-of

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Dick C Normis February 2, 2016 at 10:17 pm

Lol…First World problem of the highest order.

Still, let me give you a shoulder to cry on and some sage advice. Firstly, I love Apple stuff. Specifically the iPad and MacBook Pro (I have 2). Awesome gear.

However, I’ve never been tempted by the siren song of the iPhone, preferring instead to the more user configurable Android platform…which by the way has a Google Music variant which works like Apple Music that is hassle free but still costs $$. I also stay away from iCloud preferring instead to backup my data locally on a terabyte drive and across other platforms.

Now, on to your issue. I’m surprised you pay for itunes songs. You can download torrents…or if you’re an I.P. nazi there are apps out there to rip songs from YouTube and so forth. Not to mention free versions of Spotify and Pandora.

Bottom line…stop paying Apple for music.

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idcydm February 2, 2016 at 11:22 pm

“Bottom line…stop paying Apple for music.”…or you could turn on a radio but then I’m old school, real old.

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Dick C Normis February 2, 2016 at 11:38 pm

Satellite Radio is good, but you gotta pay. Digital radio is good too but you need DAB radio. iTunes does have several internet radio stations to pick from.

Radio is not dead.

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sparklecity February 3, 2016 at 10:58 am

No shit true story:
Last week me and a buddy were at a bar in Greenville. The 20ish something shapely female bartender asked us if we were from Greenville. I told her I lived up the ways in Spartanburg County. She asked me whereabouts, I told her the SC 290 & I-85 area (exit 63).
She actually said, “I don’t know where that’s at, I’m a millennial and If I can’t find it on my phone app I’m lost”
If some adversary can actually pull off a high altitude EMP nuclear blast, life is truly fucked for people like her.
“Bless her leggy long brown-haired lithe shapely figured heart…………….”
To be 25 again……………..”old enough to have SOME sense but still reactive enough to punch somebody without considering the consequences…..”

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idcydm February 3, 2016 at 7:16 pm

Yep, making change can be a problem for them as well as a clock that is not digital.

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sparklecity February 3, 2016 at 7:54 pm

Been there…done that……..

idcydm February 3, 2016 at 8:55 pm

A few years ago I had a teenager ask me the time. I told him it was twenty to four. He thanked me, turned took a few step turned back and ask what time that was. When I told him 3:40 he understood. It’s a good thing it wasn’t a quarter to four he may have thought I was speaking a foreign language.

flip ???? ???? February 3, 2016 at 8:33 am

Do they have any Islamic hymns I can listen to?

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Nölff February 3, 2016 at 8:48 am

I cancelled my membership because I couldn’t get it to work.

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sparklecity February 3, 2016 at 10:05 am

Although I ABSOLUTEY hated that XM got “absorbed” into Sirius (Mel Karmazin is the fucking Prince of Darkness!!!!) I’m a rabid satellite radio fan.
I subscribed to XM about 4 months after it came out. I’d give up my cell phone and internet before I’d give up my trusty XMP3 portable receiver (I dock it at my office and my car and it easily fits in my shirt pocket when I’m mowing grass – I absolutely love the thing) It can record 5 hours of broadcasting and is a MP3 player to boot. I gave my wife my original XM receiver (SkyFi 2) and she uses it at her home office (docking station as well as a car dock too). The trusty thing still works flawlessly and in some instances I prefer it to the XMP3
I’ve always done 3-4 year subscriptions and that makes it average around 9 bucks per month. I have not suffered any of the complications/outages that y’all are experiencing.
I’ll take satellite radio any day over the devices y’all are having a hard time with. All this downloading and multiple buying of music sounds like a lot of extra effort to me.

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ELCID February 3, 2016 at 1:55 pm

I stopped buying iTunes songs last year after I lost over 300 songs I’d paid for to a problem with iTunes they could not solve. No matter how many Apple Techs, or etc. got involved, no one had a way or the authority to give me back my songs. So, now, I MP3 everything to my computer and try to purchase the CD as often as possible. That way, Apple can’t rip me off again. As far as Apple Music is concerned, I’m not doing anything over the cloud except in an Airplane. Which is where I can listen to my music anywhere, regardless of wi-fi or not, and where there is no Apple Cloud available.

If you want a better product than Apple Music for free, try Pandora.

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Whiner February 3, 2016 at 3:29 pm

The is some first world shit problem, ain’t it?

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