Creating Music Playlists On Your Mac

In the Music app on your Mac you can create playlists containing any songs from your library. You can arrange these songs inside the playlist, and also organize your playlists. You can also create Smart Playlists that select songs based on search criteria and automatically update as you add new music.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to create playlists in the Music App on your Mac. 
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So when you're using the Music App on your Mac, whether you have Apple Music or just your own music collection, you can create playlists of songs. These are kind of like mixed tapes. You can put any songs you want in any order. Here I have a small selection of music in my Music App. I'm not using Apple Music here. These are songs simply purchased from iTunes, ripped from CDs, or bought from another service and dragged and dropped into music. So of course I can look at albums here and go into any individual album and listen to the album. I can go to an artist and then from there I can select the artist and listen to any album or song. I can also go to Songs and select any songs to listen to. But an ideal way to listen to music is to create your own playlist of songs from anywhere in your collection. 
One way to start a playlist is to go to File, New, Playlist or Command N. This will create a new playlist and then you can name it. You could see here it has no items or anything like that. You can add a description. So you could go in here and create a description that you could use to remind yourself of why you created a playlist. Now to add songs to it all you need to do is go to any view where you could see songs. So let's go to the Songs View here. Then you could drag and drop a song from the list into the Playlist. So you could do that with any song anywhere in your list. If you go to the Albums View here you can then go into an album and then take any song from that and drag that in as well.  Even from the Artist List here you can drag and drop a song into a Playlist. You could also click the three dots button next to any song and there you can Add to Playlist or it usually lists the most recently added to playlist at the top. So you have easy access to it if this list is long. You can add a song to the playlist that way. 
If you select a range of songs you can drag and drop all of them and you could see the icon there has the number 4 under it. You can drag all of them there. If you try to add a song to the playlist that is already there it will prompt you whether or not you want to add it again or skip that song so it's only in the playlist once. You can go back to the Playlist and see all the songs that are there. Here you can rearrange the order of the songs by simply clicking and dragging and you see how easy it is to reorder everything to get it in a perfect order. You have here the Image for the playlist which is going to combine up to four different artwork images so that it creates this simply automatic image. But you can also click on this and then select your own. So you've got defaults which are all the standard icons you see for user accounts on your Mac. You could also go to Recents, ones you've recently selected if you used a bunch. You could also select Other and Other will then prompt you to load any image from your hard drive. So you could really use anything as the image for your Playlist. Anytime you want you could Rename the playlist or change the description. 
Here at the top you've got your Controls. You can Play the playlist which will start it with the first song and play it all in order. You could Shuffle the playlist which will play it in a random order. If you want to take a song out of a playlist you can select it and simply hit the Delete key on your keyboard. Note that this removes the song from the playlist. It doesn't delete it from your library. So you could create as many playlists as you want for different situations. You could have playlists that are very similar. Have many of the same songs. For instance, you may create a short workout playlist and a long workout playlist. The short workout playlist may have five songs that you want to hear when you workout. The long workout playlist may have those five songs and another five songs.
Now you can also create something called a Smart Playlist. If you go to File, New there's also Small Playlist. A Smart Playlist is very different than a regular playlist. You don't pick the individual songs that go in there. Instead you give criteria for selecting songs automatically from your library. For instance you can use Artists Contains and put the name of an artist in here. But you could also add another artist. You have all sorts of other criteria, like the Genre or Albums or all sorts of things. Even the song length. You could say you want songs that are not greater than 5 minutes. You can limit the number of songs. So, for instance, I could have a playlist with all the Beatle songs in them but only 25 selected at random. You can get really complex using Match All the Following Rules or Any of the Following Rules. Also you could keep adding new criteria or hold the Option Key down and then the Plus changes to three dots and have extremely complex queries so that the playlist will always match a very strict set of criteria.
If you have Live Updating turned On the Playlist will automatically update. So, for instance, if you were to buy a new album and some of the songs met this criteria the playlist would automatically include those new songs. So for instance here I've set it up so it's going to be Rock Songs, Less than 5 minutes in length, and it's only going to pick 10 at random. So I hit OK and you could see I've got the playlist. I can rename it. It says it's a Smart Playlist and it has 10 random rock songs that are 5 minutes or less in length.
Now if you have a lot of playlists here, whether they are Smart Playlists or regular ones,  you can have folders to organize them. So go to File, New, Playlist Folder and it creates a playlist folder like this. So you can do workout playlists and place them all in this folder here that you can then open and close. Then you can create another one, let's call this Relaxation, and it's actually going to create it inside the Workout Folder. So you can nest the folders. Because I had the Workout Folder selected when I chose to create the Relaxation Folder it put it inside. But I could easily drag and drop it out of it. So now I've got two folders here. So I can put a bunch of playlists in each one. You can really organize to your heart's content. Notice here if I go to the Workout Folder I'm going to get a playlist here that has all of the playlists contained in that folder. So you could create, say Workout 1, Workout 2, Workout 3 for short workouts and then select the folder and play or shuffle that and it will play all of the songs in all of those playlists. 
Now this works exactly the same if you have Apple Music. You just have a lot more music that you could add to playlists. But of course syncing to other devices is going to work completely different if you're not using Apple Music or iTunes Match. If you're not using either of those services then you're going to have to manually sync your music, in other words connecting your iPhone or iPad to your Mac and then choosing what songs, albums, artists, and playlists to sync to that device, performing the sync, and then everything is then on that device and separate from your Mac. So you would have to make a change on your Mac and then sync again to your iPhone or iPad to see that change. 
One cool thing you can do with Playlists if you have Apple Music is you could Share them really easily. You can just choose to Share it with a friend or you can make it Public in your account so other people can find it when they search. Then somebody else with Apple Music could easily play the same playlist. Of course they have access to the same music that you've got since you're both subscribed to the service. So you can create your playlist, like a mixed tape, and then send it to somebody else and they could enjoy the selection of music that you chose.

Comments: 11 Responses to “Creating Music Playlists On Your Mac”

Fisher Glen

4 years ago

Can you get rid of the album cover preview so you can view more of the songs in your playlist? I believe this was a recent addition by Apple.

Gary Rosenzweig

Fisher: Just scroll up?

Bruce Holland

Hi Gary. I have a playlist that has quite a few unintended duplications on it. Is there an easy way to identify them and delete them? Regards Bruce.

Bruce: How long is the playlist? Just go through them and delete the ones you don't want. I'm not aware of any special function that will do it for you.

Thanks Gary. I was fairly sure that was the answer. Unfortunately, the list is long and the duplications are not next to each other so just deleting one at a time is very time consuming.

Sherry

What's the difference between Apple Music and iTunes? I haven't downloaded any music so this is new to me.

Sherry: Apple Music is a monthly subscription service where you can listen to anything you want. It is like Spotify. iTunes is a "store," the iTunes Store, where you can buy music. You pay once per song or album and can listen to it from that point on. iTunes also used to be the name of the music/media app on the Mac, so don't confuse it with that app. Note that Apple Music also sync seamlessly across devices over the Internet, whereas songs you buy from the iTunes Store have to be synced manually by connecting your iPhone/iPad to your Mac.

Adam

This video demo was very well done Gary. I have known about all but 1 feature for many years now as they carried over from iTunes. But being the huge musical fan that I am and creating smart lists years ago, I am glad that you put this out there for everyone to learn if they didn't already know. Things I take for granted not everyone knows. I am forwarding this video link to many friends and family.
I have in the in the past year added Apple Music to my already existing iTunes Match service

Jasper

WRT to Bruce's duplication-track-in-playlist question. I don't think that this is what you want but you can look for real duplicate files by selecting Songs (left side bar) then go to the File Menu > Library > Show Duplicate Items. This is just based on track titles, I think, so you get, say, studio *and* live versions of the same track. If you hold ⌥ you get the option of Show *Exact* Duplicate Items.

Jack

3 years ago

How to add my music from another source, 2009 Mac Book Duro ???

Jack: What kind of source? If you have an audio file, like an mp3 file, and want to add it to your Music library, just drag and drop it into the Music app.

Comments Closed.

Creating Music Playlists On Your Mac

Comments: 11 Responses to “Creating Music Playlists On Your Mac”

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