cannot rename playlists in Music since OS 14.6.1 upgrade

Experiencing ALL of these issues as well. Very chaotic behavior:

1) Able to rename playlist in playlist view, but it will not change in left sidebar. Restart of system and app, and no changes are saved.

2) Unable to create new playlists, nor delete existing playlists.

3) Dragging songs into existing playlists does not always keep after restart. Tested this several times.

I am not an Apple Music subscriber, and use the app to sort manually imported music...for 15+ years. Extremely frustrated.

I have this issue and it came in a really alarming way where Music decided to revert all data 5 days back. I lost ratings, play counts, songs distributed to different playlists. I am very uneasy right now. A few safe mode restarts seems to have helped that, meaning I can make changes and they are saved. Maybe. Who knows if it will randomly lose them all again. I have become very paranoid. 20+ years of iTunes data at risk here.

But no matter what I do, I can't rename playlists, so here I am. Interesting to note that I can attempt to rename a playlist, and exporting the itunes/music library shows the correct new name! But when I restart the Music app the playlist shows the old/wrong name. What a lark.

I spent about an hour on chat with Apple Support. Very frustrating. It was difficult for the first person I chatted with to understand that I do not use iCloud library or subscribe to apple music. At one point they insisted I couldn't sync my own added music unless I have a subscription. And they insisted that playlist data is not stored on the Mac. (... ... ... ... Yeah. This was a huge waste of time.) But I can now verify that creating a new user on my Mac and trying to rename playlists on that user's pristine Music app also doesn't work.

Eventually (by the second person) I was told apple engineers are working on this issue so keep an eye open for macos and ios updates. Let's hope so.

Also my phone won't sync with Music anymore. So that's fun. (Rather, it synced...in that my Music app got the play counts...and some items were removed from a playlist but not other playlists...but none of the changes I make in the Music app will show up on my phone. This was right before Music lost all that data. yep.)

I guess all I can do is pray to the apple gods. I have lost a lot of faith in them.

maybe they'll even fix the issue where cover art is all mixed up on my iphone. That'll be a real miracle.

/end depressed rant

Oh, another interesting thing I noticed: At one point I COULD rename NEW playlists. That is, I could create a playlist (which was progress from a few hours ago, when I couldn't), and then I could rename it. UNTIL I tried to add an * or a < (or a number?) to the name. It did not save that change, and going forward it could no longer be renamed. At this point, some sad hours into this annoyance, I can't rename new playlists at all. BUT I can rename SOME old playlists...I can't figure out what does it but it might be ones that never had a special character or numbers in their name. Then randomly as I experiment, I can't ADD any new playlists anymore. (Restart the Music app a few times, then magically I can.) This is bizarre.

Also I found this thread from Sonoma 14.2.1 Mac Music App Not Saving Changes - Sonoma… - Apple Community

so this may have been going on for longer?

And even older: iTunes not saving changes. - Apple Community

Yep - me too. I just asked for help here then noticed your pos. I raised a bug report; maybe if others do too they might take notice.

Feedback - macOS - Apple

Here's what I get (copied from my other forum post).

When I edit the name of a smart playlist or a playlist folder then the name change shows up OK at the top of the playlist when I'm looking at it but the change doesn't happen in the sidebar, where the playlist shows the name before the edit. If I quit Music and re-open then the name reverts to before the edit.

It's not all smart playlists and the only common theme seems to be that it's a problem with empty smart playlists (e.g. condition such as all 5 star tracks played less than 76 times is empty cos they've all played 76 times), but once the list is empty it sticks. i.e. in the example above I can edit the smart conditions to <78 times, which populates the playlist but if I change the name it exhibits the above behaviour - i.e. doesn't display in side bar and reverts both the name change and the smart conditions on restarting Music.

Additionally, when I make the name change then track-history metadata stops updating. So after I've edited the name as above then the tracks which play subsequently (in any playlist, not just the one edited) don't update their play count or last played date. I have to quit Music and re-start at which point the metadata updates as expected, but any play data since the edit and before Music was restarted are lost.

I've tried quitting and restarting Music, rebooting the Mac, booting into safe mode and run disc utility first aid. It's only just started happening today, so it's not related to a software update, unless a security update went in recently (I have those on automatic).

I have the same problem trying to change the name of playlist folders. Non-smart playlists seem to be OK, but I don't really use them so haven't spent as much time testing them.

Have you checked the link I recommended? https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleMusic/comments/1ekxi8f/comment/lro9qy7/

At the risk of jinxing things, the playlist renaming bug seems to have been fixed in 15.1 for me. I've just upgraded from Sonoma straight to 15.1. I've tried renaming a couple of smart playlists which haven't got artworks (grey) and the name change went straight into the side bar and stuck after re-starting Music. Metadata for played tracks is updating as it should. The Music Library Database is updating after every track play. Cross-fingers but the playlist renaming bug looks fixed for me. All my other artwork problems are still there, unsurprisingly, but I guess we have to be thankful for what we get.

Not seeing this at all. Just edited one of my playlists using the Edit option with no issues. You may have experienced a glitch in your own system but there’s no bug in my opinion. Try shutting your Mac down and restarting in Safe Mode. This often fixes such glitches.

Use safe mode on your Mac - Apple Support

I'm experiencing all types of bugs, hilariously not only can I no longer successfully create or name/rename playlists, the SAME playlist has different names in the sidebar vs the main window! Before someone suggests it might be due to ampersand symbols or the positive sign etc you can see in my screenshot, even giving a playlist the simplest name such as "playlist" will not work.

This has worked for me. Forcing a playlist artwork update makes the sidebar renaming stick.

No fix for this? This is a nightmare for me right now. No hope for any kind of fix here? Is anyone at Apple paying any attention at all? Has anyone heard of any help on this?

btw - appreciate the fixes folks offered here, no luck for me with any of them.

"We do not need speculation and more amplification of the problem,.......So submit your comments to the Apple's Product Feedback and not here."

As I state in my post, I've reported these bugs numerous times, some going back years. The report form has an 800 character limit which does not enable one to even start to explain how bugs manifest and what the user is doing when it happens. It doesn't allow screen shots. It doesn't even auto-fill the key details, even though I'm logged in to my Apple account, so it is a bit of a pain raising them, but raise them I do. By posting here I can submit a bug report with a link to the post so that if anyone at Apple ever reads them they can get a full report of the problem from my perspective and also see the possibly related experiences that other users have. For me this problem of re-naming playlists only occurs when the playlists don't have artwork. Issues with playlist artwork started about three or four years ago and have been getting worse since. Whether or not it's related to this most recent naming issue I don't know, but if I were the engineer investigating it I'd like to know as much as possible about bugs in the code if only to discount them and, hopefully, raise a separate ticket for them.

I thought I found a solution to this, as I mentioned earlier in this thread. Nope.

When I restarted my Mac today, somehow, it changed my smart playlist names to be incorrect again. I assume they reverted to a previous state. What the...?

And, it undid some of the recent changes to songs I'd rated.

This is infuriating.

alienimplant wrote:

You tried the method outlined in the link I just posted before your comment?

That didn't work for me at all.

There's more going on here than just the inability to rename playlists. When I restarted, Apple Music deleted recently changed ratings and re-added an album I'd deleted days ago.

To create, rename, or delete a playlist, it MUST have an image assigned. You either have to add your own (drag the image on the "+" area), or (in cases where auto-generated images are suggested) you can select one. If you fail to add or select an image while creating, renaming, or deleting a playlist, you will not be able to attempt it again until you restart the Music app. You cannot do it wrong, then try to do it right. You must do it right, from the beginning.

I had this problem a little while back - briefly - and then it started up again overnight. Very annoying, very inconsistent:

• Mainly seems to be with newly created playlists, not previously exiting ones.
• Playlists seem to behave better when created from the main (top) menu - as opposed to right-clicking in app.
• I have also seen individual tracks not accept changes and/or not display changes that are seen when I get info.

Relatively speaking, I have a very large library (80K tracks, a few hundred playlists) - not sure if size of library could be related.

For the record, I have restarted the machine, restarted Music in safe mode, etc. Using 2021 MacBook Pro M1, Sonoma 14.6.1.