So you’ve been through the process of matching & then saving your playlists, Playlisty said it had saved them Ok, but not all of your playlists or tracks were there when you looked in the Music app?
First of all, don’t panic: as long as Playlisty didn’t show you an error message you can be pretty sure that your playlists have been safely saved (almost always the issue is down to Apple Music itself). This section outlines the top 3 reasons it can happen and tells you how to fix it.
1. Your device is slow syncing with Apple Music
This is a common problem. By default, when Playlisty creates your playlists it creates them in Apple Music’s “cloud” and then relies on Apple Music to sync them back to all the devices logged-in to your Apple Music account. So if you can’t see some of your playlists or tracks, the most likely reason for this is that Apple Music either isn’t properly syncing to your device or it’s running slow.
If you have access to a desktop machine (Windows or Mac) you can check this by taking a look at https://music.apple.com in a browser. This is the web version of your Apple Music account and it works directly from the cloud so you should see all your playlists there even if they haven’t made it to your device.
If tracks are missing just from your device but not from the cloud, first check that Check “sync” after saving is enabled in Settings → Matching + Saving. Also (and this one sounds a bit weird) pick one of your playlists and copy a link to it (Share Playlist → Copy). Then paste that link into Safari and check it takes you to the right playlist. This frequently unblocks sync issues.
If you are still seeing this problem then there are 2 potential fixes, both of them easy:
- Wait a bit. Often if you just leave Apple Music for a few minutes (or even better, an hour or two) your playlists will suddenly appear. Similarly if you synced a big playlist and you can only see some of the tracks, wait a bit and the rest will usually turn up.
- Force a full re-sync. If you’ve waited a while and there’s still no sign of your playlists then there might be something holding up the sync on your device and triggering a full re-sync is the next step.
To force a full re-sync of your device you can go in to your Apple Music settings and:
- Turn-off “Sync Library” (Settings → Music on an iPhone or Music → Settings → General on a Mac)
- Wait a few minutes. Make sure it stays off – sometimes it pops back on by itself!
- After a couple of minutes turn it back on again and after a while all of your playlists will re-sync back to your device, including the ones Playlisty created.
2. Your device is filtering explicit tracks
If you can see your playlist Ok but some of the tracks are inexplicably missing, this is the most common cause. It’s an easy thing to check:
- Go to Settings → Screen Time → Content & Privacy Restrictions
- Go into Store, Web, Siri & Game Center Content
- Ensure that Music, Podcasts, News, Fitness are set to Explicit
If you don’t set this to Explicit, Apple Music will hide all explicit tracks from you.
3. You are looking in the “Downloaded” section of your library
We’ve made this mistake many times ourselves: on an iPhone/iPad, if you go to the Library tab of Apple Music and tap on the “Downloaded” section of your library you will get a view of your library which is filtered to show only items which have been downloaded to your device for offline listening. In other respects it looks just like your library and it has it’s own Playlists section so it’s easy to mistake it for a view of your library. Problem is, none of your Playlisty playlists will appear in this section unless you explicitly asked Apple Music to download them.
So if your Playlisty playlists are missing, make sure you are looking in the right playlist section!