9/11/24
9:00 am

How To Use the Music App On Your Mac Without Subscribing To Apple Music

It may seem like you need to subscribe to Apple Music to use the Music app on your Mac. But you can simply ignore Apple Music in the sidebar and search results and use it with your own purchased or ripped songs. You can also disable it so it doesn't appear at all. And yes, you can still rip songs from a CD if you have an optical drive.

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

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can use the Music App on your Mac without subscribing to Apple Music. 
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Now this is a question I often get and often see posted elsewhere online. I did a video about it several years ago. But the settings have changed a bit so let's talk about it again. So there is an app on your Mac called Music. There's also an Apple subscription service called Apple Music. They are two different things but you use the Apple Music Subscription Service with the Music App. However this confuses many people because it sometimes looks like you need to subscribe to Apple Music to use the Music App. But you don't! If you're not using the Apple Music Subscription Service you can simply Hide it in the Music App and continue to use the Music App as you did before with songs you've purchased from the iTunes Store or songs you've ripped from CD's. 
So when you run the Music App on your Mac you'll probably see this first. It asks you to subscribe to the Apple Music Service. So right away it looks like that is what you need to do. But if you look here on the left sidebar you can see you're simply on the Apple Music Homepage. You don't need to be on the Apple Music Homepage. You can go down to Library and you can view your own artists, albums, and songs. So, for instance, here I've got several artists, a bunch of albums, and the songs on them stored in my local library. I can just ignore this Homepage here and simply go down to the items here in my Library and then play that music. 
One point of confusion is when you try to Search. So for instance I'm going to try to Search here and when I look at the results I'm going to see a ton of results but none of them will work for me. They will all ask me to subscribe to Apple Music. It will even give me a message about that at the bottom. It seems like in order to play any music I need to subscribe to Apple Music. But if you look carefully you could see what's going on here. You've got three Search Modes here on the right. Your Library, Apple Music, and iTunes Store. You're going to get results according to which one you have selected. So if you have Apple Music selected it's going to give you Apple Music results. If you don't subscribe to Apple Music you're basically just previewing what's there. What you could get if you do subscribe. 
But you could switch to Your Library and see the results that are in your library on your Mac and not in Apple Music and anything  here you can play just as normal. You could also switch to iTunes Store. This takes you to the iTunes Store that has been around long before Apple Music where you can purchase individual songs or albums. So when searching simply make sure you choose the one you want. Probably Your Library if you're not using Apple Music. It will remember that choice. So from now on when you search it will just show you the results in Your Library and you can play the songs as you would expect. 
But you can go a step further than this and actually get rid of Apple Music here from the Sidebar and from Search results by simply turning them off. The way to do that is to go to the Music Menu and to Settings. Then select General. Here you're going to see Show and you can turn Off Apple Music. When you do that you'll notice that those items are gone here from the left side. Then if you leave Search, if you are already in there, and go back to it you'll notice you're just down to Your Library and iTunes Store. Apple Music will no longer be a choice for searching. You can also, by the way, turn off the iTunes Store if you'd rather not see that as well. You can go back into Settings and turn Off iTunes Store. Now note you may not see the checkbox for Apple Music here if you are currently subscribed to Apple Music even if it is just the free trial. It's not going to let you turn it off if you're actually using it. Now when you Search the only choice is to look in Your Library. You won't even get the choices over here because there is just Your Library available. Not the iTunes Store. Not Apple Music. 
Now of course if you are not using Apple Music you may want to have the iTunes Store turned On so you can purchase music if that is the way you want to get your music. However, you can also rip music from CD's just as you could in the earliest versions of iTunes. That hasn't gone away either even though there are a lot of people that say that it is not there. It certainly is there. But you're only going to find it if you actually have an Optical Drive plugged into your Mac. Mac's haven't come with Optical Drives for a long time so you have to get an external one, either Apple's or some other company's. Usually they are USB and you plug that in. Notice without it plugged in this is what Music Settings, General looks like. But if I were to plug this drive into the USB port and then check in Music Settings I can see there is a new setting here for When a CD is Inserted. You can set it to Show the CD, Play the CD, Import the CD, Import CD & Eject or Ask to Import CD. Just like you could years ago. So when you leave it at Ask to Import CD and then you take a CD and you insert it into this drive you can see it's going to prompt you right away. In this case it found three different albums that match this CD. I'll just pick the first one there. Then it is going to ask for permission. Then it is going to ask me if I want to import this. It shows it here. If I say No I can still get CD info or Import CD. I can click the settings button here for more. I can click the Edit button and edit the list. I can Eject as well. So, you have all the different options for ripping CD's into Music that you've always had. Also, if you go into Music, Settings and you go to Files look for the Import Settings button. That allows you to determine how the music is encoded. So you can use the AAC Encoder which is probably what most people want. But you can go, say, to MP3 Encoder if maybe you plan to use the songs on some other device, like a car's MP3 player that only accepts these kind of files.
So there you go. That's how you can use the Music App on your Mac just like you could years ago before the Apple Music Service even existed. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 21 Responses to “How To Use the Music App On Your Mac Without Subscribing To Apple Music”

Sheldon

7 months ago

Thanks bunches

Brian Cowan

7 months ago

Like to understand how to download music to a UBS

Gary Rosenzweig

7 months ago

Brian: Do you mean a "USB" as in a USB Flash Drive? You can just drag and drop songs from the Songs list (or a Playlist) in the Music app to a location in the Finder.

Forrest

7 months ago

Perfect! Thank you! I have spent hours, days, months...adding our large CD music collection. This article encourages me to continue on with this project and not get sidelined by my Apple Music Subscription.

Joyce Hann

7 months ago

Great! Will you clarify how to preserve the imported music through subsequent OS updated? I have lost content in the past. Thanks!

Gary Rosenzweig

7 months ago

Joyce: You shouldn't need to do anything. Just updating the operating system shouldn't change any of your data. Not sure what happened with that past incident, sorry.

Sally Mellick

7 months ago

I had to subscribe to Apple Music last time I got a new Mac so I could get my music onto my new Mac with my Playlists etc. is that still the case, or is there an easy way to transfer my music to my new Mac?

Gary Rosenzweig

7 months ago

Sally: You didn't need to use Apple Music for that. First, there is the much cheaper iTunes Match for syncing all of your ripped/purchased music to all of your devices. But you don't even need that for a one-time transfer. Just use Migration Assistant or being the whole Music library over manually.

Julie

7 months ago

Thank you so much. Been trying to figure this out for years!

Zaph Mann

7 months ago

I use the Music app extensively as a Music manager and DJ - There are other functions that Ar euseful - for instance the search [TOP LEFT] is not the same as the search if you use the little magnifier (click top right - or option-command-f) - this leaves the results in whatever view you had (like list view) - this works in any folder or playlist and for your whole library if you select "songs" first

Zaph Mann

7 months ago

You can also control the view so it is much like it was in itunes... view options for each playlist or folder etc... can be set from the menu "view" (show view options + select "view as songs" uncheck show artwork and select the columns you'd like. You can also access this from the tiny pull down menu next to the spyglass (top right)

Carol Cramp

7 months ago

Thank you! Once you have it on your Mac will you also be able to see it (& play it ) on your phone & iPad?
Carol

Gary Rosenzweig

7 months ago

Carol: Depends. You have Apple Music that does this, but iTunes Match is a cheaper option if you just want to use your own purchased and ripped music. And then you have the same syncing options that have been around since iTunes and the first iPods.

Greg Parry

7 months ago

Would appreciate a vid on how to get songs (legally purchased) from my iPhone to the Mac - instructions on Apple Support are not always clear to follow. Many thanks

Gary Rosenzweig

7 months ago

Greg: Purchased where? The iTunes Store? You wouldn't move them from iPhone to Mac, you would just download them directly to your Mac. Go to Account, Purchased.

Judith Glover

7 months ago

This should be on TV as a PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT. I wasted 3 years of subscription money before I stumbled across a way to avoid Apple Music.

Michael Nohe

6 months ago

Thanks, Gary. Very helpful.

Jose Xavier

3 months ago

I'm currently in the process of loading my CD collection into Music without a subscription to Apple Music. I have an external hard drive setup to save space on my internal disc. Everything has been OK, except that Music appears to be dividing random albums into two, with some songs on one and some on the other. There appears to be no pattern to this that I can find so far. The only way I can correct this is to delete the two albums and reload the same album again. What could it be?

Gary Rosenzweig

3 months ago

Jose: Probably something to do with the info data on those songs. I'd look at that carefully.

Jose Xavier

3 months ago

Thanks Gary. I've been checking to see that the data matches, and it appears that it does. It's just a random thing that happens, even if the album has been loaded for weeks, then all of a sudden it gets divided. Could it be a hard drive issue?

Gary Rosenzweig

2 months ago

Jose: no, it wouldn’t be a hard drive issue. Must be something changing or updating in the info somehow.