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.