There Was a Network Problem Getting Apple Music - No Subscription

I have my own carefully curated library of over 2,000 albums that I use in my car with Carplay and Siri. It's perfect. Or rather it was.


Foolishly I signed up for a free 6-month trial of Apple Music (I just thought I could play a few albums I haven't heard for years) and found that I could no longer call up an album from my own library as it would always use the Apple Music version. And even worse, it was no longer possible to play one of my own compilation albums that it didn't have - it just played a random selection of rubbish instead. On top of that whenever I was driving in an area with no 4G connection, such as the English countyside, or even parts of the M25 in Hertfordshire, music would stop playing.


At least I had the option to swap all of my own music for Apple's switched off, so it didn't upload my whole collection (or Apple's version of it) into the cloud.


Anyway, the free trial has now ended and since I had cancelled the subsciption auto-renew I'm now back to using my own library, which sort of works, but for one annoying thing: whenever I ask Siri to play an album (e.g. Play album Abbey Road by the Beatles) Siri replies "playing Abbey Road by the Beatles" followed by "there was a network problem getting Apple Music" and then plays it from my library anyway.


At least it works now, but is there any way of stopping that annoying message everytime I ask Siri to play something?

iPhone SE, iOS 14

Posted on Apr 3, 2023 08:04 AM

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Posted on Apr 25, 2023 06:48 AM

I had the same problem for my personal collection and I think I just figured it out.


I went into the Apple Music settings and realized I had cellular data off. Turning it on seems to allow the app to query the online servers so I don’t get the network problem message. This makes sense since I didn’t have the issue with Siri in my house where I was on Wi-Fi.


Now if you want to ask why the app needs to query the Apple Music servers just to play local files of music, I don’t know! But it stops the annoying message so that’s good enough for me. :)

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Apr 25, 2023 06:48 AM in response to steveoman

I had the same problem for my personal collection and I think I just figured it out.


I went into the Apple Music settings and realized I had cellular data off. Turning it on seems to allow the app to query the online servers so I don’t get the network problem message. This makes sense since I didn’t have the issue with Siri in my house where I was on Wi-Fi.


Now if you want to ask why the app needs to query the Apple Music servers just to play local files of music, I don’t know! But it stops the annoying message so that’s good enough for me. :)

Apr 3, 2023 09:00 AM in response to hcsitas

Do you mean deleting it from my phone and then reinstalling it? No I haven't.


I'm happy to give it a go as long as there are no downsides, but I can't think of any apart from if it would remove all of my music from my phone and I'd have to upload all again from iTunes, which would take some time.


Ah, wait a second - I've just remembered that my iPhone lightning socket is broken so I'm using a QI charger instead so I couldn't reload the music...

Apr 3, 2023 09:24 AM in response to steveoman

I use File Explorer, can recommend. Use the free version to find out for yourself, it’s ad-free and comes with built-in players. The reasonably-priced non-subscription Pro version covers all Apple platforms and includes support for various Clouds. Take a bit of an effort to pivot away from the Apple ecosystem but otherwise works flawlessly.

https://www.skyjos.com/fileexplorer/


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There Was a Network Problem Getting Apple Music - No Subscription

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