Apple Music certainly has a lot of things going for it and it seems like the most popular aspects of the music streaming service revolve around playlists. Users can very easily create playlists, discover existing ones and share everything with their friends both on iOS devices and on iTunes, something that allows a lot of songs to easily circulate and keep things interesting for everyone involved.
Set up your devices
Before you can actually do all those great things with the playlists, there are a couple of settings you need to enable in your iOS device and your iTunes, regardless of which OS you have installed it on. On your iPhone, open the Settings, go to the Music section and turn on the toggle for “iCloud Music Library”. You will be asked to merge your local and cloud libraries or replace the local library with the cloud one. I would recommend choosing the Merge option, simply because you will not lose any music this way.
On iTunes, open the Preferences, go to the General tab and check the box that reads” iCloud Music Library”. In order to force the sync, search for any song in Apple Music and click on the ellipsis (three dots) next to the song. Select the “Add to My Music” option and follow the steps to sync your music.
Creating and managing playlists
Since the entire process of creating, discovering and sharing playlists can be done from iOS devices as well as the iTunes app, I will show you how to do everything in both.
iOS
- Open the Music app and go to My Music > Playlists > All Playlists > New.
- Enter a name, description and image for your new playlist. These are optional but highly recommended.
- Tap on the “Add Songs” button to start creating your playlist. The presented library of songs will show you music from both your offline and online libraries, provided that you are connected to the Internet, of course.
- Select all the songs you want by tapping on the red “plus” (+) icon next to them.
- Once you have added all the songs you want, tap on the Done button and you should be taken to your playlist’s page.
Your playlist is now created. To change the order of the songs, drag and drop them in the desired spot. Whenever you are playing a song, you can add it to your playlist by tapping on the ellipsis icon and selecting the “Add to Playlist” option.
iTunes:
- Launch iTunes and go to the Playlists tab.
- Click on the plus (+) button and select the “New Playlist” option.
- Enter the details of your new playlist and click on the “Edit Playlist” button if you want to add a description.
- Search for any song you want to add and click on the ellipsis icon next to it. Select the Add To > [Playlist] option and add the track to your desired list.
Your (presumambly) first iTunes playlist is now complete. To change the order of the tracks, click on the “Edit Playlist” button again.
In both iOS and iTunes, created playlists have additional context menu options. Tapping the ellipsis icon will allow you to make the playlists available offline, delete them and even duplicate them (iTunes only).
Discovering playlists
Apple made it clear from the very beginning that its Music service would not follow the same “self-service” methodology of similar music streaming services. Instead, the focus would be on discovering music through curated playlists and personalized suggestions which is exactly what the company has done. In the Apple Music app, the “For You” tab is dedicated entirely to providing you with new songs to listen to, including entire playlists which can be added to your own selection via the ellipsis options.
Of course, Apple is not the only one who thinks discovering playlists is a great way to pass the time as there are many pages dedicated to sharing playlists from Apple Music. You can try Playlist Hunt or even the Apple Music Playlists subreddit which is fairly active.
Sharing playlists
The method of sharing playlists is actually the same in iOS and iTunes. Just find the playlists you want to share, tap or click on the share icon and choose how you want to share it. Do note that the playlist will be presented to the recipient as a URL which they will have to click on in order to listen to the playlist via their respective Apple accounts.
