Delay When Playing or Skipping Songs

I get a few seconds delay intermittently when playing or skipping a song (even ones downloaded). This functionality works perfectly in the native music app or the control centre widget. Even the "Adding Content To Apple Music" sample code app is very laggy. This bug needs to fixed because it makes users think the app is frozen, thus ruining the app user experience.


Please submit your own bug reports to apple if you are having this problem so we can get this issue resolved faster!

  • This happened to me when my phone was performing a back of my phone. Once the backup finished the music que had no delay.

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Same here when trying to play a different track by setting "nowPlayingItem". Seems the lag has gotten even worse in the last iOS point update. I've filed a bug report and have tried everything I can think of to make the process smoother. But as of now, my users' satisfaction level is going further down and I don't know how to get answers regarding the status (or even recognition) of the issue.


If anyone finds and answer or has more info to share, please chime in!

Same here. Maybe if we make enough noise something will get fixed. Maybe.

Has anyone else had a chance to submit a bug report on this? I've submitted two (Sept 20, 2017 & Jan 4, 2018) with no news on either. I really hope a solution is close. My users are getting suspicious, as I've been claiming it's someone else's fault for so long 😊

Hey guys. Am I crazy or it is working now?

Without upgrading the phone, my app doesn't present the lag anymore 😮

I can play/pause without freezes, yay. Hope it lasts. No idea what happened. Please check. 🙂


P.S. I did submit the bug report around 10 days ago

I don't see a fix 😢 I occasionally get a less than 8 second freeze, so I suppose that's a tiny improvement. Are you still seeing no freeze at all?

No Dave, I'm so sorry, it was a false alarm I guess. No idea what actually happened but it was working, I swear!

Now it's back to the usual. I am also not able to reproduce exactly what I did that time. 😟


My guess is that the system had cleared Music.app from the memory, or something similar. Force closing the app doesn't automatically do that anymore apparently, in fact when you start Music.app again it loads immediately, which means that it's already available in memory.

It's just a guess because I really don't understand what happened otherwise...

Dear Anyone at Apple,


I'm trying to be patient.

I've had less than reliable results from MPMusicPlayer for more than 10 months - first dev forum thread 76019 - and have submitted two bug reports - 34552165 four months ago and 36297908 three weeks ago. There have also been several other developers reference this issue in dev forums posts - 92467, 93386, 94231, 84259.

Could someone with knowledge of this issue please give us an update? I know that everything takes time, but some info on what / when / or how to fix this would be most appreciated!

I'm trying to be patient. Really!

If I were to find that a problem is MUCH BETTER with a beta seed - cough eleven cough cough dot cough cough cough three - am I allowed to mention it here, or could I only mention that in the beta forum? Asking for a friend ;-)

I have updated to iOS 11.3 beta 1 and still see large performance dips. Also changing systemMusicPlayer.nowPlayingItem seems to be broken and starting playback at a different index other than 0 only can be achieved by creating a MPMusicPlayerMediaItemQueueDescriptor, changing its

startItem property, and add then adding it to the queue using systemMusicPlayer.setQueue(with:)

@rnantes My observation of the fix is sporatic. Same device, same tracks same software version of everything yet still see the freeze sometimes and not others. FYI, the freeze is gone at times on a dervice with 11.2.5, so it's not limited to beta.

Not that I'd ever discess a beta issue on a public forum 😉 but I have a hunch that if you read the beta notes regarding MediaPlayer, you'd find a place to "startItem" regarding your issue above.

@davenorfleet I see that now. Hopefully it means they are working on the music kit issues especially the slow performance of changing the systemMusicPlayer queue and starting playback

From what I can test, this is mostly resolved in iOS 11.3 beta 1. I'll keep you guys posted.

I got this issue twice now. It only happened with my own library, playing songs offline. The first time was like a month ago and the way I resolved it was by force-restarting the iPhone and closing the Music app. The second time was yesterday after updating my iPhone to iOS 15.1.1. I force-restarted my iPhone at least three times to no avail. I got like 5 seconds of delay with every song. It was not a bluetooth issue as I tried the speaker. The ONLY fix I found was to plug my iPhone to my MacBook and sync the library. It was immediately fixed. Not sure what was going on, but it was clearly because of the update. It messes up with my library. Hopefully it doesn't happen again. I hope this helps.

Hello guys, I have found a solution that worked for me ! Iphone settings, cellular datas, search for Music/Itunes in the list, and switch it on ! I hope it will work for you ! Bye !

  • Hello guys, I have found a solution that worked for me ! Iphone settings, cellular datas, search for Music/Itunes in the list, and switch it on ! I hope it will work for you ! Bye !

  • THIS IS THE ANSWER!!! Thank you!

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I recently just switched from an IPhone 8 (which I adored!) to an IPhone 14 and the Apple Music lag is driving me crazy. The Lag on my iPhone 14 didn’t exist on my iPhone 8 even with the new updates. The Apple Music lag is so bad that when switching between songs sometimes the music is lagged for minutes at a time and it eventually skips a bunch of songs or just doesn’t respond so I have to close out the whole app and reopen it. I’ve tried force quitting the app, resetting my phone, resetting network settings, taking off low power mode, reinstalling the app, reinstalling the music and nothing is working. I love Apple Music but the lag is so annoying. Anyone have any other tips to fix this issue? I’m currently running IOS 16.4.1 and the problem still exists.