How to fix problems caused by apple's flaky iTunes Updates

Apple changed something about iTunes, and all of a sudden, I couldn’t play the music library on my iPhone. Is that any way to treat a long-time customer?

I couldn’t find an explanation for the problem on the Apple support site or anywhere else, but I did find a solution in a post on the Apple Support Communities from October 2013. The original solution entailed the following:

• Choose Settings, then iTunes & App Store, and under Automatic Downloads, slide the Music setting to off (gray). 

That didn’t work for my iPhone, but solution offered in a July 18, 2015, response to the original post did restore at least some of my music library:

• Open the iTunes & App Store screen as described above, and below the Automatic Downloads section, slide the Use Cellular Data setting to on (green).

Ultimately, I recovered my iPhone music library by removing all the songs temporarily via iTunes on Windows, upgrading to iOS 9, and then restoring the library. Perhaps not the ideal solution, but it appears to have worked (he wrote with fingers crossed).

More fixes for common iTunes glitches  

Two other iTunes problems that defy explanation: Having to de-authorize and then re-authorize the PC to get it to sync the phone; and having to search for the shuffle control.

The first problem I solved by signing out of my iTunes account, after which the sync proceeded as expected.

Finding the shuffle control is a lot easier in the new version 9 of iOS which returns the shuffle-all control to its proper, prominent place: the very top of the library, as iPhone Hacks’ Osas Obaizamomwan explains in a September 18, 2015, article.

In the iOS 8.4 version of iTunes, finding the shuffle control is a challenge. Here’s what you have to do:

• Play any song, and then tap the gray bar at the bottom of the window. It’s the one that shows the song title, along with a pause button on the left, and a settings button on the right. 
• When the full controls pop up, press the two crossing, right-pointing arrows below the volume control. 

(Note that the two chasing-each-other arrows on the right will loop the current track.)

When you’re done, press the down arrow in the top-left corner of the window to hide the controls.

Of course, the simplest way to shuffle your music is to tell Siri to “shuffle music.”

You’ll find more information on the glitches that users have encountered since the release of Apple Music in a September 3, 2015, article by MacRumors’ Joe Rossignol.

In a July 24, 2015, article, Macworld’s Karl McElhearn explains how to shuffle songs by a single artist.

People who manually set songs in their library to be skipped when shuffling are out of luck, as explained in this discussion on the Apple Support Communities.

---