After upgrading to Tahoe and iOS 26, the sync function is not working for music

Spoke to Apple Support and there is a known bug, for the short term, use the Finder option on the Mac, select your iPad or iPhone in the side bar menu, the Sync option works this way for me. Give it a try!

I think I just figured out a shortcut. I went into the music app with my phone connected. Then I selected the “View” menu, and then turned on “Full Screen”. In full screen mode then “sync-settings” button works and I can now view all my sync-options for the phone. I hope this works for you all as well. Note, you can also use the “function/fn and F key” to enter full screen mode within the music application.

I went to try to sync my iPhone in the music app again and tried this full-screen window again and for some reason the sync button is now covered up by a tab menu and inaccessible! So, I went into my display settings (under system settings) and adjusted to the smallest text option under the “built-in-display” setting. I then re-opened the music tab, clicked on my phone , selected full-screen mode, and the sync button was uncovered and clickable again.

So that worked to both uncover the sync button and make it responsive to a mouse click. It would be nice if Apple would fix this glitch in the next update. Also, maybe add another command key function to allow us to go into the iPhone sync tab, or an alternate route as my iPhone never shows up in the finder “devices” list anymore, it only shows up in music and photos.

Finally deduced that during the update to OS26 the music library file had become corrupted!! So binned the corrupted file and initiated a new music library file. After uploading from my hard drive 11,500 albums onto a new library file all seems well. However there are a few caveats in the new music app compared to the old one. 1) you cannot play music immediately, the app will crash. 2) You have to wait a while for all of the 'data' to load into the new music app before you can play any music without it crashing especially for a local library of this size (I haven't timed it but I leave it around half an hour from opening to be safe. However previously I could play music straight away, so this is a pain). 3) If syncing this to your iPhone, you need to be patient. when you click on the iPhone in the side bar of finder, it will appear blank for dome time. You need to leave it until all of the information is there, as in the sync button. Syncing new music will take as long as it takes dependent on the size of your local library.

Please be mindful that this only applies to a local library stored on an external drive. I do not use cloud based music, so no idea how that is behaving for other users.

Thank you sber6415! This worked for me. The "sync settings" button worked in the full screen mode. iOS 26 has not been very good imo. Both my M4 iMac & iPhone 16 Pro are slow & glitchy. This has been the worst OS since I've been on a Mac (about 20 years now)

I'm having the same problem using my iMac since upgrading to Tahoe. I can no longer drag and drop albums to my iPhone. However, I stumbled across a work around. If I go to "Recently Added" and type in the album name in the "Find Window" then Album will appear and I am then able to drag and drop to my iPhone. Or if you go to Albums and select that way you can then drop and drag. The drop and drag doesn't seem to work if you select Artists to perform the drop and drag. 🤷‍♂️

I tried the full screen fix, it did work and music did sync or so I thought some time later I noticed a lot of albums missing about 43Gb in total. So I gave up with Apple Music and subscribed to iMazing. It took a while but eventually everything was back on my iPhone.

This is not the first time Apple Music has caused me a head ache when trying to sync at least twice maybe three times before it's failed to sync and either duplicated everything or deleted vast amounts of music. I have no intention of trusting Apple Music do any syncing or copying in future. It's maybe also time the Music development team sorted out database management as it's all over the shop at times.

I was not an iTunes fan and hoped things would improve with Music how wrong was I.

It has been an ongoing thing since I have been usung the beta version.And that it is fully released ,it is still doing it.Any solutions from Apple yet ? I am calling them as I type .I will keep you updated and please do the same.

Thank You

I just updated my iphone 15 pro max and my macbook air to ios 26 and Tahoe 26, and started having the same issue. The sync settings button is there in the music app, but it is unresponsive to clicks. I double clicked it and the window minimizes for some reason, then I bring it back up and it only shows me all the tracks on the phone but no other sync-settings like playlists photos, music etc.

I also called them. And that was the way they told me to go as well. Thanks for the reply. I have a Mac Pro. Not a fan of the last two OS systems. Big Sur and Catalina were my favorites. Apple is trying to do too much.

Yesterday I synced my iPhone and got a "software needs to be downloaded" alert although I have been updating it a couple of times a day as usual.

The installation seemed to go OK without any further messages. I have seen this happen in the past and the helper files get installed 20 minutes later, but yesterday i saw no new files arrive. Anyway syncing still works for me, also on the iPod touch, so maybe you could try again now?

I just purchased new a Apple Iwatch 11. To make along story short a message asked me to upgrade to OS26. So I Did. Following I COULD NOT SYNC any of my playlists to my my watch.I contacted Apple Support countless times. The end result was still the inability to sync playlists to my Apple Watch 11. I will add that the same effect happened with my Apple Watch 7. The end result is,sadly I am returning the watch 11 to Apple.

I am having several issues with the music app. Songs won't play, they start and then stop and it corrupts them across platforms (I use Apple Music). EVEN THOUGH it won't update the play count and last played data across platforms. Any ideas will be appreciated.