Apple Music Keeps Quitting Unexpectedly

I have the same issue and it's driving me crazy. It's rendering the Apple Music product completely useless for me.

I'm on an Imac, Catalina 10.15.7. Have a large own library combined with streaming. Files on Synology NAS. Has been working fine and since a week, Apple Music just keeps quitting a minute or sometimes longer after start of playing. No changes made to the setup myself. Happens both with playing own songs and streaming.

Tried all the suggestions:

• Diagnostics - nothing found
• Safe mode - Music doesn't play then, not quite sure why
• Disconnect all devices from iMac.
• Logging in and out of Apple Music
• Restarting, etc.

The only way I get Music not to crash is when I uncheck the Sync Library option in settings. Then I only see my own files and playback is uninterrupted. As soon as I check that back on, it keeps dropping. So it must be in this service, and only on a Mac.

Using Music on a windows laptop works fine on same network. App on iphone works fine as well.

Urgently looking for a solution.

Dennis

Thank you hyruled, AlexanderVdv & djmsmit for all those descriptive instructions. Unfortunately none of those procedures worked for me. But, I was able to use my Time Machine backup and restore my Music folder from 2+ weeks ago. At first it appeared that everything was cool, but I noticed I only had 20,000+ songs instead of around 21,000+ songs. Luckily most of those songs/albums were from Apple Music & by turning off/on the "Sync Library" it started to download those missing tracks. But then I noticed something else. I was starting to get a grey icons (a exclamation point with a circle around it) telling me that the tracks were missing. There ended up being over 2,300 missing tracks now. Ranging from Apple Music, Uploaded & Matched. Luckily I soon realized that I could simply highlight all my songs, choose "Remove Download", which still left the songs in the Music app, thankfully, then immediately followed by choosing "Download" with all the tracks still selected. After that procedure had finished I was finally back to the state I was before all this. So, now it was finally time to test. I played several tracks safely & it did not crash, so I left it play all day & it seemed to be fine, but I did notice that none of the tracks Crossfade now. But I'd rather have that issue versus crashing constantly. Still don't know what became corrupt exactly to start the crashing though, which is still very puzzling. Regardless, thanks for everyone's help!

Hello audreydw,

Thank you for using Apple Support Communities! It sounds like the Music app quits unexpectedly on your Mac. You're in the right place to find a resolution.

Let's start by trying the troubleshooting suggestions outlined in the following support article:

If an app freezes or quits unexpectedly on Mac - Apple Support

Since it's a built-in app, skip any suggestions you are unable to complete, such as uninstalling the app. If you have another user account on the Mac, testing if it occurs in the other account could also help us further isolate potential causes. If you don't have another user account, here's how to create one:

Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac - Apple Support

Keep us posted on the results.

Cheers!

Hi audreydw,

Thanks for getting back to us with the results. Since the issue doesn't occur with a new user account, we'd want to further isolate if this may be related to login items under the original user account following the steps here:

If your Mac has a blue screen or other startup problems

Running First Aid on your startup disk can also help detect and fix issues with apps quitting unexpectedly:

Repair a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac

If you're still experiencing the issue after trying those steps, we'd like to have you contact Apple Support using the link below:

Get Support

Take care.

I'm having the exact same issue. It just started all of a sudden also. I'm slightly confused as to what you guys did though.

1. Close the Music app.
2. Rename the Music folder to something else.
3. Open the Music app and change the "Music Media Folder Location" to point to the newly renamed folder.

It doesn't quite make any sense. Do I have the steps correct or incorrect? Could someone please list the steps like I did because it's slightly hard to follow the long sentences in the paragraphs.

I incredibly appreciate anybody taking the time to do this as well, because I'm sure many more will benefit from this solution too.

Thank you!

-Doren

Great to read it seems to work for some!

I still think most of the work is done by renaming the music library file, not the folder, as mentioned by Sean Michael above. This seems to trigger a reset, causing the trouble.

My setup was that my music file is in my Music folder on my hard disk whereas my music files are on a nas. I pointed my default management folder there too, to make sure any new music lands on my NAS. As my suggestion was that Apple Music might get confused by not having the default media folder not pointing to the same folder my library file is in, I changed it to default. New music will not automatically be put on my NAS (which is of course what I'd want). So steps for me, in a new situation:

1. Turn off Music. Rename the music library file. I added _Dennis to it. See if this triggers an update of the cloud library.
2. If that doesn't work, create a new login account on your mac and set that up with Music. See if that plays without crashing. If you have the idea this plays and Music shows all. your files, turn off Music in your original account, copy the music library file of this account to the correct folder in you original account (to me this is <username>/music/music. next to the other (that you renamed). See what that does.
3. As a last test, if else fails, change the default media folder in Music, pointing it to <username>/music/music/media. Restart Music.

Hope this of of use.

Has anyone found a fix for this yet? The last thing I haven't tried yet is reinstalling MacOS, which requires a time machine backup because of potential data loss. I don't have an external memory device and don't want to buy one for something that might not even work

Hi,

I've managed to resolve this issue. Had extensive help from Apple (through chat and a few calls - quite pleased with the service I got) and eventually I came across something that worked.

My setup is a large music library (65k) on a NAS. IMac on Catalina 10.15.7 and an Apple Music subscription. We tried everything from test accounts, re-installs, etc. I could get it to play on a test user account (where it only showed the cloud versions of my music) and it also worked on my real login account when signing out of Apple (and playing local files only).

I noticed that the library file, so the file called Music Library typically located in your music folder on your iMac (in <username>/Music/Music), was very large for my real account was way bigger than the one for my test account even though they contain the same amount of songs. It is about 30 times larger (900Mb vs 30 Mb). As I also had a slow Music app, especially when a new song starts (app becomes unresponsive for a while), I tried to copy the Music Library file from the test account into the music file of my real account just to see what happened. I left the old one in the same folder but renamed that one first before copying in the one from my test account. In the process I also reset the default media folder within Apple Music to default (it was set to point to my NAS music folder before). Not quite sure if this did something, though.

All in all, when I did this and restarted Apple Music, it started updating the cloud library, but the funny thing is: from that point on Music didn't crash anymore! I was expecting Apple to pick up the new library file. Instead, I noticed that it was still using the old and renamed music file (I could see it being modified everytime a song finishes). Turned out that the new music library file was not being used. The old one is apparently connected to the application in other ways than just the filename :-).

It took my computer several hours to update the cloud library but as said, Music hasn't crashed since.

Hope this makes sense :-). Feels a bit like a lucky thing but maybe the resetting of the cloud library after renaming it did the trick for me. Curious to hear if this worked for you.

I am not sure what I did - I renamed the music library to something else but didn't go further than that, and I also reset the location as you did. The renamed library shows up below the original one in the folder, and if I delete it, it shows up again if I reopen Music, and seems to be the one that's updating (the file size changes, while the original doesn't). All my songs appear to be there, though, so I'll take it - remaining cautiously optimistic that this continues working :)

Thank you for the suggestion! It was really random but it seems to have worked, I just hope it continues to!

I'm pretty sure I did exactly as you listed, in that order. I never made a test account or anything, just renamed the Music Library and reset the music media folder location. I have no idea why it worked, or which step it was that made it work, but it did.

It looks like before I reset the music media folder location, all my songs were in [User]>iTunes>iTunes Media>Apple Music. They're still there now, but newly downloaded songs from today show up in [User]>Music>Media.

I never moved Music Library out of the [User]>Music spot though, I just renamed it and the new renamed one shows up next to the original one. The new renamed one is the one that looks like it's updating now, not the old one.

Did you try either step? Let me know if it works. I hope it's the actual solution and not just a fluke that randomly worked for me today

I had contact with apple about this issue and for me it’s solved.The problem is a bug in you’re user account...delete the user with the problem en add the user back.Just save important things on the cloud and problem is solved...Hope this helps everybody out there with this annoying problem.Good luck to everyone

I am having the exact same problem!!! Also desperate for a solution. The app is unusable right now

Same problem, music keeps crashing in second song almost every time at exactly nine seconds.It doesn't occur on my wife's user account...please fix the problem.