I am switching from the default music player on my iPhone to using Spotify to play music. The recent updates have meant that I can't use the music player in the same as I used to and I much prefer Spotify in general.I still want to use iTunes on my Mac to organise playlists. What I need to set up is essentially a reverse smart playlist. I have 2000 songs in my iTunes library but I only want 500 of those on my phone. Is there a way to have the songs that get put into my smart playlist (that gets synced to my phone) getting automatically copied into a folder in Finder and have that as the 'Local File Source' in Spotify? Or would I just have to do this manually? Hopefully that makes sense, and any kind of help would be awesome! Thanks

I've been a Spotify user for a while and appreciate that based on a genre, an artist, or even a single song, it can automatically create a playlist with that genre or with similar artists/songs that go well together. Is there a way I can replicate that with Apple Music? We recently got a Home Pod, so we got the free trial for 6 months of Apple Music. But whenever I ask Siri for something like, "90s rock" then it plays an album that has 90s rock in the title (always telling me "by various artists") – but it doesn't create it's own playlist and also doesn't seem to learn our prefs.

I'm trying to clean up my Apple Music library on macOS, but I can't find a way to delete multiple playlists at once. I don’t want to delete any songs—just the playlists. Over time, I’ve ended up with hundreds of playlists, many of them auto-created by apps like Piezo, which generates a new playlist for every recording. Deleting them one by one has become incredibly laborious. I expected to be able to Shift-click or Command-click playlists in the sidebar, then press Command-Delete or use a contextual menu to delete them in bulk—just like in Finder or Mail. But the Music app doesn’t support multi-selection of playlists in the sidebar, which makes the UI surprisingly rigid for this task. Is there any way to delete multiple playlists efficiently without removing songs from my library?

In the macOS Music app (formerly iTunes), when viewing a playlist or smart playlist “as Songs”, there’s a huge playlist title/header area. **Is there any way to hide or shrink this header area?** At least in my usage, it’s an obnoxious waste of space: it takes up about 1/3 of my whole screen height to very little purpose, and leaves the column browser and playlist contents very cramped (see screenshot). When viewing “as Playlist”, you can scroll this header area up offscreen, but when viewing “as Songs” (which I prefer, as a fan of the column browser) and in most other views, it stays fixed. I’m currently using Big Sur 11.6, using Music 1.1.6.)

I am migrating from Spotify and I want iTunes to accommodate the way I used to add songs to a "favorites" playlist, just like the Starred Songs works on Spotify. Initially I created a Smart Playlist to self-update with all my hearted/loved tracks (let's call this **Playlist 1**). That didn't work because apparently the heart rating doesn't persist between devices, and most of the point of this is so I can have this self-updating playlist available offline on mobile. My second solution was to create a non-smart playlist and manually update that one with any new music the smart playlist catches. (Let's call that **Playlist 2**.) That works (I can set this manual playlist to be kept accessible offline on my phone), but it's cumbersome to manually copy-paste songs every time I heart new tracks. My third solution was to create another smart playlist especially made to mirror the first. (Let's call this **Playlist 3**.) The first playlist is set to auto-add any hearted tracks, but since this parameter doesn't carry to mobile, I made this second smart playlist that simply adds whatever music is added to the first. Essentially a mirror playlist, but with a different parameter. This _kinda works_, but I get a strange error: The playlist *was* created, and it *works* as I intended (successfully mirroring the first one at all times), but apparently I can't access it from other devices for some reason. Why does this happen? The **Playlist 3** contains exactly the same tracks as **Playlist 1**, so the given reason that **Playlist 3** "includes other media kinds or songs that are not eligible" doesn't make any sense. Anyone knows why is this happening and/or how could I solve my initial problem? Thanks!

I got myself a nice iPod Classic 5.5 (Don't know why though, I have a perfectly working iPod Nano 5th gen). I want to duplicate everything on my Nano to my Classic so that means not just the music but includes the playlists too (and metadata). Is this posibble and secondly is there a (simple) way to achieve this? I read something about simply cloning the data to the new device but that was from one classic 5.5 to another. Would that work too for nano 5th gen to classic 5.5?

I am virtually certain that in early iOS products -- for example, on my old 5th-generation iPod Touch, which was contemporary with the iPhone 5, and which shipped with iOS 6 -- one could set the stock Alarm Clock to use a playlist (from the Music app) instead of an alarm. That feature seems to no longer exist; while it is still possible to play an individual song as an alarm, one can no longer choose to play an entire playlist. When exactly did this feature go away? That is, in what version of iOS was this feature removed? PS: And just to forestall the obvious: I am aware of the work-around using the Shortcuts app . It seems unnecessarily complicated, and in any case that doesn't answer my question.

I can export a single playlist from iTunes to m3u format easily enough, but is there any way to do it en masse? I have about 40 playlists and it's exceedingly tedious to do it for all of them one at a time. I know you can dump the entire library database if you're just switching between macs but I use these all over the place. That library file is megabytes and megabytes and while I could conceivably reconstruct my playlists from the xml plist it's not ideal.

I used to add songs to a playlist by right-clicking it and then selecting "Add to Playlist." It would show all existing playlists that are not smart. But today, somehow I can't do that anymore. It seems to have forgotten all my playlists, even though they're still there, and I can still drag the song into them as an alternative. I updated to Sonoma 14.2.1 yesterday. And today, when I clicked on an unauthorized song in my library, I couldn't play any songs at all, and at one point the contents of all my playlists were empty. I had to restart my Mac a few times (not just force-quitting the app) to get it working somewhat normally again. But that's when I ran into this problem. Any help to solve this issue would be much appreciated!

The documentation for shuffle/shufflable in the iTunes Applescript dictionary is really confusing, at least for me. As I read it shuffle seems to be a property of a playlist (not a state of the program itself) but in the regular UI there is no such property for playlists (I would love to have it so I could set some playlists to always shuffle by album while other should always shuffle by song). Anyway, I want an Applescript that enables shuffle by song/album and plays the currently selected playlist. How do I write the shuffle part of such a script?

I have some rather complicated scripts that I use to create MP3 files which I use for improving my language skills. Each session creates a new file in each of six languages, with text embedded in the lyrics tag. It adds the files to existing albums named for the language.  Each track has the same title which changes each session. Then in a **copy** of each new file, it changes title to (language), album to "Today’s Reading", and track number to the order I want to play/read.  These **replace** the previous set of "Today’s Reading."  (Album name misleading because I usually go several days on one set.) It finally occurred to me that it would be simpler to make "Today’s Reading" a smart playlist where Title contains (new title). So I have albums English, Spanish, Dutch, … each containing titles T1, T2, …, TN and album "Today’s Reading" containing titles English, Spanish, Dutch, … I want to simplify it to have albums English, Spanish, Dutch, … each containing titles T1, T2, …, TN and playlist TN where title contains TN. I could just remove all the code for "Today’s Reading" from the script and easily create the playlist manually but **is there a not too messy way to automate it with OSAscript or other shell command?** Or with Xcode — I haven't used Swift before, but as a retired software engineer, I am hopefully not too old to learn it. Actually, it doesn't have to be a "smart" playlist, since my script will know the titles of the tracks it should contain.  In fact, a "normal" playlist is better, since a smart playlist does not allow changing the order of tracks it lists. *** **Update**: Seems I have not been perfectly clear.  What I’d like to automate (besides creating the playlist, which is easy to do) is importing it into the library.  I know of three ways to add it to the library, but all of them are manual action — open, double-click, or drag into Songs view.

I'm looking to create a smart playlist on Apple Music that automatically creates a playlist or finds all of the songs in my library without lyrics. Is there a way to filter songs that Apple Music hasn't assigned lyrics to yet? My initial idea was to curate this list and then manually sift through to weed out tracks that simply lack assigned lyrics but aren't truly instrumental. I'm aware there are scripts for songs with custom lyrics, but I haven't added custom lyrics or descriptions to any of my tracks. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

I have a playlist in Music.app that contains over a thousand songs.  My iPhone doesn't have enough storage to accept all of them without deleting apps.  So I created another playlist that says to take twelve hours worth at random. Unfortunately, at every sync, it gets the **same** list of songs.  The only ways I can think of to get a different random sample is to delete and re-create the playlist, or to change random to something else and change it back. **Is there some other simple trick to make it re-do the random sample at each sync?**

I have seen these duplicate playlists many times: I never use any of them, and frequently delete all four, only to have them reappear the next time Music is launched. When I delete them, they stay away until exit, but they are there at the beginning of the next session.  Today, I deleted all four and exited Music immediately and re-launched it.  There they are, with no sync of any devices.  iCloud music library is OFF and has been all along.  This has been happening for many versions of Music and MacOS, and on at least two different laptops.  On 26 June 2023, there were **four** of each, but that quickly went back to two. Apple has been silent on the bug report that I made in February 2022, **so I thought I’d check here whether anyone knows the cause and/or the fix**.

[Years ago I asked how to stream m3u radio files (music) on the iPhone](https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/322850/how-to-stream-a-m3u-file-on-ios-devices) . Revisiting my question from the past, none of the IPTV players allow to play the music when the app is in the background / when the iPhone is in standby. I think this is the case, because none those players use the default music player interface, as they are designed to play video, not audio. My question is: Is there any app that plays local m3u file radio streams through the default media player interface, so that I can enjoy radio while the iPhone is in standby? The best thing would be an alternative to RadioDroid for iOS, but it needs to come with a m3u importer. The file is locally accessible only, because it gets synced via Syncthing. To clarify, with "local m3u file radio" I mean a m3u file stored in the local iPhone storage that contains of EXTINF entries that point to online radio stations (http-URLs), such as:

#EXTM3U
#RADIOBROWSERUUID:9617a958-0601-11e8-ae97-52543be04c81
#EXTINF:-1,Radio Paradise (320k)
http://stream-uk1.radioparadise.com/aac-320 

#RADIOBROWSERUUID:96156a3e-0601-11e8-ae97-52543be04c81
#EXTINF:-1,Deep House Lounge
http://198.15.94.34:8006/stream 

I want to emphasize that I cannot import the m3u file itself via URL, as it's not available online.

In iTunes and on iPods (excluding the most recent Nano) there is an option to playback a playlist shuffled by album. This option does not exist in "Music.app" on iOS-devices. However, since you can play a playlist in order I was thinking that it would be possible to emulate the shuffle by album-behaviour if you somehow managed to sort the playlist in a random by album order and then just play it from the first track with shuffle disabled. This raises two questions: 1. What determines the sorting order for a playlist on an iOS-device? 2. Can you somehow (maybe with an Applescript) sort a playlist in iTunes in a shuffle by album order?

Could anyone tell me how to transfer a playlist from iTunes (12.5.3) to my iPhone? I've tried selecting manually manage music, but the playlist does not appear in selection at all. I've also tried Wondershare TunesGo, but I have the same issue, no single playlist appears for me to select. I appreciate any tips you might have.

So a month ago I lost my 2020 MacBook Air's SSD (which had been running Catalina) to a coffee spill; the computer is now fixed (and upgraded to Monterey) but the drive is wiped. The documents had been backed up to Dropbox, but the music folder was not. I have my previous MacBook (running High Sierra) that contained my music current to mid-2020, whose stuff I have copied over with Migration Assistant, so I do have that at a minimum - but I'd like to get things back the way they were before the spill last month. I'm not worried about having to re-download the music itself. What I'm worried about is my precious metadata, which are the reason I still use Apple's music app instead of Spotify. Since the mid-'00s I have maintained a carefully curated random-play playlist: it uses nested smart playlists to pick songs based on their star ratings and how recently they were last played. This is by far my preferred way to listen to music and I want to keep it. My hope is to keep all the star ratings and last-played from pre-spill times (Nov 2021) so I can get my music back to the way it was. I have three places that this data can be drawn from: * Before the SSD died I was able to copy the "Music Library.musiclibrary" file from the old computer. I was NOT able to copy all the music, but I did get that file. * My iPhone has most, possibly all, of my music on it from before the spill. * And everything up to mid-2020 is still there copied over from the older computer's iTunes. The simple thing would be just to import the 2020-era iTunes library to the Music app on the new computer, but if I left it at that I'd lose over a year's worth of star ratings and last-played data (plus the playlists I created during that year). Since I have the old Music Library file and the iPhone, I'm hopeful that I can get the ratings and last-played back using those. I'm just not sure exactly how to go about it. Given the parameters of the situation above, can you please advise on the most effective way for me to get my music setup back to pre-spill status, including playlists and metadata? Note: I don't have an Apple Music subscription. My iPhone used to sync with the old computer, the one that died.

I use Overcast on my iPhone and have several Smart Playlists set up. I was using one of them to play back the entire back catalogs of 4 podcasts that I wanted to catch up on. This is roughly 500 episodes altogether. I had no trouble creating the playlist but when I look at the list of included episodes it leaves out several hundred of the oldest episodes and seems to start the list at an arbitrary point in time and go from there to the present. If I look at each of the podcasts individually I've marked all of the episodes in each one unplayed and can see all episodes in each one. If I play from the individual podcast then it starts with the oldest episode and automatically moves to the next newer one when finished. It's only in the Smart Playlist that I can't see the oldest episodes. If I create a new Smart Playlist and only include one of the podcasts then I see all of the episodes for that podcast. When I add another one it to the playlist I suddenly can't see the oldest episodes from either one any more. Is there a limit on the number of episodes that can be in a playlist? Thanks in advance!

Many songs in my playlists are not tagged as lossless when I play them. I then go to the album and select display entire album. There I can see, that most of the time, there is a different version of the album available (one that is tagged as lossless). I then have to delete the song from my library (losing all corresponding playlist entries) and then re-add the song from the lossless album. And this for all songs that are not tagged as lossless (and there are many). Anybody else have this problem? Created from this reddit post : https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleMusic/comments/nw0rqx/do_i_really_have_to_manually_replace_the/