is Apple Music killing my storage space?!

[motulist]

I've been using Apple Music a lot since it went live. Yesterday I had 1 GB of storage space free on my phone, today I have zero!

In settings I looked under Usage and there are no changes shown in any apps storage space usage. There's no app shown there that suddenly has 1 GB more storage use than before.

I haven't done anything new recently with my phone besides play Apple music. So it seems like this can only be caused by Apple Music. And I don't have any songs "available offline".

WTF is happening?

EDIT: I just powered-off the phone and restarted it, with no effect. There is still 0 bytes of storage space available.

 

[eclipse01]

Spotify had this issue, had to do with music in the Cache, not sure if this is doing the same thing

 

[motulist]

Spotify had this issue, had to do with music in the Cache, not sure if this is doing the same thing

I think you're probably right. At this moment though, the only tenable solution I can think of is to nuke the whole thing wipe the phone back to a fresh install, and then reinstall everything.

But maybe I should try to hobble along in this F'ed up manner until iOS 9 comes out, so that it'll either fix the problem, and if not then at least I'll be doing a fresh install with the latest major OS version.

Sucky situation. I really like Apple Music a lot, I use it constantly, but if it ate all my storage space with its cache files then that's really lame. Is there some setting somewhere to clear the AM cache?

 

[eclipse01]

I really hope I am wrong actually, this was one of my pet peeves w/ Spotify

 

[motulist]

I really hope I am wrong actually, this was one of my pet peeves w/ Spotify

Totally. One of the big benefits of streaming music for me is that I don't have to waste storage space on my 16 GB iPhone. Previously I'd been using Amazon Music for my streaming music. Amazon had many serious negatives, but it did excel at letting me listen to tons of music wherever and whenever I wanted it without taking up much storage space at all. That's a *huge* benefit of streaming services for us 16 GB iPhone users.

 

[Paco II]

I'm curious, as I've not read it mentioned so far: are you experiencing problems from this? In other words, is your phone acting as if it really has no space left? Apple loves to dynamically manage these things. If it is just a caching issue, the OS may be handling this without issue.

 

[theGroove]

Having same issue. Viewing usage on my phone shows 367MB of free space. Connect phone to laptop and itunes show ~8GB of free space. According to the usage on my phone, I lost roughly 30MB of free space after listening to apple music for about an hour.

 

[Paco II]

This makes me think even more that it may just be a cache thing. Have you tried copying something to the phone that exceeds the available space? I wonder if iOS dynamically removes cache as necessary?

Having same issue. Viewing usage on my phone shows 367MB of free space. Connect phone to laptop and itunes show ~8GB of free space. According to the usage on my phone, I lost roughly 30MB of free space after listening to apple music for about an hour.

 

[theGroove]

This makes me think even more that it may just be a cache thing. Have you tried copying something to the phone that exceeds the available space? I wonder if iOS dynamically removes cache as necessary?

I have not, although it's worth trying to see what happens. It may be dynamic, although, you think they would prevent the low storage message from popping up. I had gotten that a few times and ended up removing a couple apps I never use.

 

[Paco II]

I have not, although it's worth trying to see what happens. It may be dynamic, although, you think they would prevent the low storage message from popping up. I had gotten that a few times and ended up removing a couple apps I never use.

Good point about the low storage message. The fact that iTunes is showing so much free space is what got me thinking that.

 

[CTHarrryH]

I'm not yet running Apple music but have that issue where on the phone it shows very little available but on iTunes it shows a ton available. it has been on another thread also.
I believe the phone - I haven't had the amount of free space that iTunes says I have for years.

 

[motulist]

Ok, it's almost definitely Apple Music sucking up all my storage space. I had ~200 MB available this morning, then I did nothing with my phone besides play with Apple music, and now I have zero bytes of storage available again. Dammit.

 

[theGroove]

Ended up restoring. Now phone shows the correct amount of free space and matches what itunes says.

 

[zhenya]

Yes, it is definitely Apple Music caching. Spotify does the same thing. Realistically, you want this to happen, as it caches stuff that you have recently listened to as you are likely to want to listen to it again. This saves you bandwidth that you are paying a lot of money for. If these services didn't do this, people would complain that these streaming services were using a LOT more data than they already do.

If you can't get by with allocating even a single gigabyte of space for a cache, it's time to buy a device with more storage space!

 

[saudor]

Thought one of the point of streaming was to save storage space? I never understood cache for streaming either. How often does one hear the same song and thus hitting the cache /saving bandwidth.

 

[Paco II]

From my perspective the only issue here is the display of low storage alerts. Caching is fine as long as it doesn't interfere with the user experience. AM caching should not be triggering a low storage alert.

 

[motulist]

O

From my perspective the only issue here is the display of low storage alerts. Caching is fine as long as it doesn't interfere with the user experience. AM caching should not be triggering a low storage alert.

It doesn't just trigger a low storage alert, the storage space is truly consumed. After AM uses up all my storage space, then the OS won't let me download new apps, won't let me take any photos, the whole phone slows down and starts to act janky, etc. the storage space is truly used up.

 

[Paco II]

That's messed up. The music cache should obviously not be causing that. I'd definitely file a ticket with Apple.

It doesn't just trigger a low storage alert, the storage space is truly consumed. After AM uses up all my storage space, then the OS won't let me download new apps, won't let me take any photos, the whole phone slows down and starts to act janky, etc. the storage space is truly used up.

 

[iggypod]

There are many posts on Apple's discussion forums with users having the same problem.

FWIW (and I have not turned on Apple Music yet to know personally if these solutions work) I've read of people turning off Apple Music clears the cache (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7114643). Other users say that that doesn't work and they have to delete files via https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7121936 to clear it.

 

[motulist]

There are many posts on Apple's discussion forums with users having the same problem.

FWIW (and I have not turned on Apple Music yet to know personally if these solutions work) I've read of people turning off Apple Music clears the cache (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7114643). Other users say that that doesn't work and they have to delete files via https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7121936 to clear it.

Holy cow, that worked! I turned off Apple music and instantly 3.4 GB of free space reappeared! Awesome, thanks!

At the same time, that really sucks! This is a HUUUUUGGGGE bug that makes AM a serious liability to use if you aren't a techie and lucky enough to come across the solution from a kind stranger. This better get fixed in the very next update.

 

[iggypod]

Holy cow, that worked! I turned off Apple music and instantly 3.4 GB of free space reappeared! Awesome, thanks!

At the same time, that really sucks! This is a HUUUUUGGGGE bug that makes AM a serious liability to use if you aren't a techie and lucky enough to come across the solution from a kind stranger. This better get fixed in the very next update.

Agreed - very flawed. It's certainly another head scratcher in this Music release. I'm glad it worked!

 

[motulist]

Overall I totally love AM, but there are a few pretty serious bugs that need to get quashed quick.

 

[motulist]

In the last 3 and a half hours AM has gobbled up another entire 1 GB again. Apparently I'm gonna have to turn AM on and off again like twice a day just to have a functional amount of free storage space on my phone. Quite lame. Still, I love AM so much that it's worth it to deal with these major version 1.0 bugs. But I'm hoping the next version will fix the big bugs like these. And I'm also hoping that this bug-fix release comes very soon.

 

[motulist]

Apparently I spoke too soon. The first time I turned AM off and on again, 3.4 GB came back. The next time I turned it off and on again, 2.2 GB came back. The time after that only 1.3 GB came back.

 

[dkh587]

Once I saw this thread, it confirmed my suspicion that Apple Music was killing my memory. I freed up about 700MB today of pictures and videos, and less than 30 minutes my extra memory was gone. They need to fix this asap.