David A. Cox: Hello everyone and welcome to my in-depth
tutorial all about Apple Music.
We have a lot to cover in this tutorial so if you would like to skip ahead
to a specific chapter, please know, you will find links to all time codes
down below in the video description.
I wanted to make this video because I made the switch to apple music
several months ago, and there were plenty of challenges along the way.
This video is basically the guide that I wish I had before making the switch.
Today's video is sponsored by our friends at SoftwareKeep.com so
big thanks to them, and we'll give them a bigger shout out later on.
For now, let's not waste any more time.
Let's begin the class.
The very first thing that I'd like to teach you is how to migrate any
pre-existing platlists that you may have stored in other music services
like Spotify, Pandora, or Amazon music.
I have to tell you when I was going through this process, the part that
stressed me out the most was the fear of having to manually recreate
all of the playlist that I'd created over the last several years, the
good news is that there's a free app that makes this process painless.
I want you to go into the app store and search for an app called song shift.
When you launch the app, just tap on the plus symbol that you see at the top right.
Now, let's tap on set up source at this point, I'll tap on Spotify.
And if the music service that you use is not listed here,
just tap on where it says other.
Now I'll tap on the playlist that I want to transfer, and we're good to go.
At this point,
Song Shift, will attempt to match the songs in my playlist, in Spotify with
the same songs available in Apple Music.
There's always a chance that some songs may not be available on both services,
but so far I've had very good success.
One thing that you should know about this app is there is an optional in-app
purchase that allows you to batch process exporting all of your playlists.
It's really not that hard to do this process manually.
So I feel like most of you will be just fine with the free version.
When song shift is done, matching your songs, you will see the same
playlist appear in the Music App.
See, I told you that was easy.
We are going to take a brief commercial break, but when we come back, I'm going
to walk you through all of the most important settings in the music app.
We'll be right back.
When it comes to settings, you may discover that you need to have different
settings on different devices, depending on your available storage, internet
speeds, desired music, quality, and more.
If you're following along on iOS, let's go into the main settings
app and then scroll down to music.
The very first option that you'll see here is whether or not you want to grant
Apple Music access to cellular data.
If you do have an unlimited data plan, this is an option you'll
probably want to enable, but if not, I'd recommend disabling it.
The next setting I'd like to discuss is the ability to sync your library.
And I wanted to bring this up because some of you out there may
have already subscribed to iTunes match and are wondering what the
difference between the two is.
The answer is there is no difference.
Enabling this feature will sync all of your music no matter where that music
came from across all of your devices.
In this next section, we start to get into audio quality.
Now, personally, I love Dolby Atmos and strongly recommend turning it on,
if you own high quality headphones.
Now let's tap into audio quality.
The first option that you'll see here at the top is the
ability to enable lossless audio.
I recommend only using this feature
if you have plenty of free space on your device and or high quality headphones,
you can even specify what audio quality to deliver based on whether a song is
downloaded or streaming via wifi or.
If I tap into wifi streaming, you will see that we have three different
levels of lossless audio quality.
A typical three minute song will be six megabytes at what is
considered to be high quality.
Whereas lossless 24 bit 48 kilohertz.
The file size is six times larger.
If we bump it up another notch to High Rez Lossless, that file size
explodes to 145 megabytes per song.
By the way, if you do have one of those crazy sound systems that
can support that level of quality, you need to invite me over for a
cocktail because I need to hear it!
Most people find it difficult to tell the difference between those last two options.
So I advise you to go with lossless at 24 bit 48 kilohertz.
If we go back a page, one of the other settings I wanted to
mention is the ability to learn from your listening history.
This will help Siri be able to accurately predict your taste.
And I've got a couple of other great tricks that I'm going to teach you that
will help better train the algorithm.
Those are coming up later on.
If you have any devices that are running low on space, you may
also want to consider turning on optimized storage in order to help
prevent over stuffing your device.
Another feature worthy of mention is sound check.
I strongly recommend using this feature for several reasons, but that goes
double if you enable Dolby Atmos.
The reason why is if you're listening to a song that has Dolby Atmos, and then you
either turn it off, or if it then goes to a track that doesn't have that feature,
the volume can dramatically change.
So I absolutely do recommend enabling this feature.
Let's now switch over to the desktop version of apple music, because
there are a few settings and features that are not available on iOS.
Under the general tab, I recommend that you uncheck the
option to display a notification every time a new song comes on.
Next, let's click on the playback tab.
I don't know about you, but I love it when tracks crossfade.
Now let's go into the files tab.
Right now, this is telling me that my music media folder is
located inside the music folder, which lives inside my home folder.
I wanted to bring this up because if you do have a large amount of music, or if
you just want to free up some space off of your computer, you might want to consider
moving the music media folder onto something like an external hard drive.
And just as a reminder, provided that you have sync library turned
on, you'll still be able to access that music on your other devices.
One thing to keep in mind about syncing your library is this
process does not happen instantly.
In fact, if you're just enabling this feature for the first time,
you should temporarily turn off your energy saver, make sure you're
plugged into power and then go take a really, really long nature walk.
Import settings is where you can determine the audio quality
of songs imported from a CD.
I tend to recommend going with Apple lossless.
Obviously no Mac comes with a CD drive, technically known as an optical drive,
but if you do need one by chance, I'll put a link to an inexpensive
model in the video description.
For those of you with massive music collections that were
imported from CDs, I've got a few tricks that are just for you.
Let's now click on advanced.
And for starters, I recommend that you check this option, which will update
the artwork for all of the songs that were imported from your CDs.
One of the most common requests that I get from people who do have
large music collections is they want to have a way to easily separate
music that was imported from CDs,
as well as music that they purchased through iTunes, from the music
that is available as part of Apple Music,, the monthly service.
The way that we're going to conquer this beast is to create something that
is referred to as a smart playlist.
If you're following along at home, I want you to click on "File."
Then go to new and select "smart playlist."
In this first category,
I want you to set it to "purchased."
This next category, we're going to set to "is true."
Now we're going to add a second rule by clicking the plus symbol.
Here at the top, we want to make sure that it says "match any."
For the second rule, let's set this first field to "Cloud Status"
then let's set this next field.
to "is not."
And finally, in this last field, let's set it to "Apple Music," and just like that,
we have isolated all of the music that was imported from CDs, as well as purchased
music and hidden all of the songs that are only available to me while I am currently
subscribed to Apple Music, the service.
The last thing that I need to do is add a name to my smart playlist.
For now,
I'll just call this CDs and iTunes and because smart playlists sync, I can now
access that same playlist on my iPhone.
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End of sponsored segment.
When you open up the music app on iOS, you will see five tabs at the bottom.
Listen now contains a combination of auto-generated playlists as well
as music you've recently played.
If we scroll down a little bit, one of these sections is made for you.
And one of the playlist in this section is called new music mix.
This playlist updates automatically.
So when your favorite artists come out with new music, that
is where you'll go to find it.
The browse tab contains everything from new releases, music,
videos, artist interviews, and all sorts of other content.
One of the things that I suggest you do is if you scroll all the way to the bottom
of the browse screen, one of the sections that you'll find is "More to Explore."
If you happen to own AirPod pros or AirPods Max, this next tip is for you.
Go into browse by category and scroll down to spatial audio.
Here, you'll find a little playground of everything that's
available in spatial audio.
Now, if you're not familiar with the term spatial audio, don't worry.
We're going to actually come back to that in a little bit.
The next tab that we're going to discuss is the radio tab.
And this part can be a little bit confusing just because there are a couple
of different types of radio stations at the top of this list, you'll find all
of the live options, including music one, music hits and music country.
If we keep scrolling, you'll also find other prerecorded radio stations.
You can also create a radio station based on a song or an artist.
To do this tap on the three dots and then tap create station.
The most important part of your library is that it contains all of your playlists.
And what I recommend you do is tap on edit here at the top right,
and you can uncheck any of the categories that you don't care about.
For me personally, I uncheck everything except playlists.
To create a new playlist, just tap on where it says new playlist.
And to add music to that playlist, just again, tap on the three dots
and then select add to playlist.
At this point, I would like to teach you a few different tricks that will
help you train the algorithm to be able to accurately predict your taste.
When you tap on the three dots icon, whether it's next to a song, an album or
a playlist, two of the options are love.
And the other is suggest less like this.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into my favorites playlist, tap on
the three dots icon at the very top, so that it selects all of the songs in this
playlist, and now I'm going to tap love.
Another thing that we can do to help train the algorithm is to teach it
what kind of music we don't like.
For this example, I'm going to use country music.
Sorry, country fans.
So what I'm going to do is go into this playlist for today's top country hits,
tap on those three dots at the top, and then hit, suggest less like this.
Now all you have to do is repeat that for any other genres that
you don't particularly care for.
You should also know that you can give these commands by using Siri.
So for example, if you hear a song that you like, you can say, Siri, I like this,
or you can say Siri, I dislike this.
Believe it or not, there are actually several different ways that you
can gain access to apple music.
And if you already pay for iCloud storage, you may discover that you
can get apple music at a significant discount just by switching to one
of the brand new Apple One plans.
Now, just in case you didn't hear about this announcement, apple one allows you to
bundle different apple services together.
So for example, let's say you have a spouse and maybe a couple of kids.
By going with the family plan, you can share an apple music subscription with up
to five other people for only $20 a month.
Plus you get shared iCloud storage access to apple TV plus, and more, there's
also a subscription option where you can pay $5 a month to access apple music.
But the thing is, is that you can only control it through Siri.
And to explain my opinions on this, I'm going to go to Larry David.
Nah, not, not not really.
One of the chapters I wanted to include was a chapter on spatial audio.
And let me just say this.
If you have never experienced spatial audio, the next time you go to an
apple store, I recommend that you ask the employees to give you a demo on
either AirPods pro or AirPods max.
What spatial audio does is it allows your headphones to
track your head movements.
The result is an incredibly immersive experience.
You remember earlier, I said that part of the reason why I'm making
this video is because I want you to learn from my mistakes?
Well, one of them has to do with Spatial audio.
I would like to now teach you how to manually turn Spatial audio on or off,
because there are certain situations where you probably don't want it
enabled just for safety reasons.
For example, if you're on a bicycle To access some of the spatial audio controls.
You do need to have your headphones on, then swipe down from the top,
right to access control center.
Next we're going to force touch on the volume controls.
That's where you push a little bit harder into the screen, and then I'm going to
tap on "spatial audio head tracking."
There,
it reveals the options to use fixed audio, or I can turn this feature completely off.
Keep in mind, if you would ever like to work with me, one-on-one you can sign
up for a little tech therapy session by visiting my website at TechTalkAmerica.com
thank you so much for watching everyone.
This is David A.
Cox with tech talk America.
Class Dismissed.