I am dismayed that once again after hours of fruitless effort, I come hat in hand to ask for help from this list.
Approximately 4 months or so ago I discovered that the album artwork for purchased items in Music was thoroughly scrambled. I had a long travail with multiple Apple Care representatives. A senior rep finally observed that they knew about this problem and were working on it and would get back to me when the issue was solved. I’ve heard nothing. I’d decided that I could, unhappily, ignore the artwork since the test titles were correct. Any ideas?
Then while away this winter and often offline, I discovered that much of the music on my iPhone had not been downloaded. I sync the phone with my MacBook Air, where I believe all items are downloaded, and was disappointed that quite a bit of music I wanted to listen to while in the car was unavailable. Since then I’ve determined that the only way I can download that music is to open the files on the phone and see whether they are there. There doesn’t seem to be a functioning way to do them all at one time.
I’m also interested to learn whether there is any way to convert music I’ve purchased from Apple into formats that can be opened in another app and move all my music to a new player/management app.
Whew! Thank you.
Hi. Are you syncing with your MacBook Air via cable, or by using iCloud Music Library? I use the latter and my syncing problems disappeared a couple weeks ago. But I did have some techniques to work around the problem I had (which may well not be the problem you had)…
Regarding conversion: there were two ways to purchase music from Apple (the old DRM way and the newer non-DRM way). Check a song you want to convert: what do see under the Kind field?
I connect my iPhone with a cable to my MacBook Air for syncing and back up. The format of the files I’d like to convert is Protected AAC Audio File. My interest is to convert my existing music files although when purchasing new music it would be good to choose an unprotected DRM file.
I’m not selling or sharing beyond an occasional tune that I might be wanting to learn.
I’m also concerned that since Apple Music is really a streaming service now, Apple’s focus is not going to be on customers like myself who will run out the clock with purchased music. I’d really like to get my music shifted to another player if possible. These problems seem unaddressed by Apple. I can find instructions from Apple for syncing my streaming music but not my purchased music. I don’t understand why the music on my phone is not simply synced with the music that is currently on my computer. Why should I have to download it?
Thanks.
I’m not one, but plenty of people do this. There are still people who use iPods and sync with iTunes (or the Finder).
On the iPhone, do you have Settings / Music / Sync Library turned on? If so, try turning that off. I believe that’s meant for people who stream their library from an Apple Music subscription or from iTunes Match.
I can find instructions from Apple for syncing my streaming music but not my purchased music.
Apple’s instructions for syncing are here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201253?
Choose the option from there based on whether you run Catalina or later on a Mac (for the Finder) or iTunes for Mojave or earlier or a Windows computer.
This setting is only available if you subscribe to Apple Music streaming service.
Thanks, Doug. I do use the procedure Apple recommends for syncing the iPhone to the MacBook Air.
The only way I know to convert these is to burn them to CDs then reimport them. I did this to all mine, but it might not be workable for you. I’m not sure if there exists software to emulate a CD drive and use an ISO disk or something, not sure if the Music app would work with that.