What to do when Apple Music has its head in cloud
Q. Since trying out Apple Music, my iPad shows all the music available online, not just what’s on my iPad. That doesn’t work well when I’m stuck on a slow Internet connection. How do I tell the Music app to only play the files on the tablet?
A. The streaming-music service Apple launched in June, like the company’s earlier iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match features, can exhibit an unjustifiable optimism about your bandwidth.
If you put an iOS device in airplane mode, the updated Music app knows enough only to offer song files stored on your iPad or iPhone. But to this app, any bandwidth is great bandwidth. It doesn’t adapt to the constrained, unreliable WiFi you often find on planes and trains, in hotels, and at public gatherings.
(Like, say, big press events hosted by large tech companies. We’re just saying…)
That can leave the Music app straining to play a song off Apple’s cloud service when it should know to give up already.
The fix for that is fairly obvious if you read Apple’s instructions, but it’s a layer deep in Apple’s iOS app. In the Music app’s My Music view, tap the header at the top of the screen--it will be labeled “Artists,” “Albums,” “Songs,” “Music Videos,” “Genres,” “Composers,” or “Compilations,” depending on your view selected--and tap the slider control next to “Music Available Offline,” the last item there.
Tap that slider again, so it’s no longer showing green, when you return to a steady and fast connection.
Apple’s iTunes can suffer from the same bandwidth blind spot, as I saw myself after I signed up for iTunes Match. Here, too, the fix lurks in a menu: In the “My Music” or “Playlists” views, go to the View menu and select “Only Music Available Online.” In Windows, the entire menu bar is itself normally hidden, so you’ll have to hit the Ctrl and B keys to bring that to light.
To reverse that change, go back to that menu and select “All Music.”
You should also keep these settings in mind if you’re tempted to use these services over a mobile-broadband connection, where they can eat into your data cap on most carriers besides T-Mobile (it exempts many music services from its caps) and Sprint (like T-Mo, it still sells unlimited plans).
Google’s Play Music app for Android is itself linked to a cloud-based music service and so can suffer the same sort of connectivity confusion. In that case, tap the menu icon--the button with three horizontal lines at the top left corner of the “Listen Now” screen--and tap “Downloaded only.”
If your wireless carrier caps your data use, Google’s app also lets you restrict streaming to WiFi. Select “Settings” from its menu icon, scroll down, and tap the checkbox next to “Stream via Wi-Fi only.”
Tip: Backup and restore an iPad or iPhone to trim “Other” storage
If you’ve held off upgrading an iPhone or iPad to iOS 8.4 -- itself just updated to iOS 8.4.1 -- because your device doesn’t have enough free space for that download, you may not have to wring your hands over which appreciated but space-hogging apps must go.
Instead, plug the device into your computer, let iTunes start, select the device and inspect the colorful storage-use bar at the bottom of the window. The second segment from the right should be labeled “Other,” and it may be disproportionately large -- as it is in the sample screenshot in Apple’s own tech-support note.
As numerous iOS users have found, you can shrink “Other” down to size by doing a full backup of your iPad or iPhone, then restoring it from that backup. For example, Mac journalist John Moltz reported a year ago that this process clawed back 6 to 7 GB of space on a 16 GB iPhone; last week, Houston Chronicle tech writer Dwight Silverman tweeted that the same workaround recovered 10 GB on a 32 GB iPad.
It’s not a given -- when I tried this with my own iPad, I got the same “Other” figure before and after the restore -- but it’s worth a try. If nothing else, it will ensure you have a complete backup of your device on your computer, not just the limited backup provided by Apple’s iCloud service.
Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, e-mail Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro.