Your Apple Music Needs Smart Playlists
Apple Music’s curated playlists are good enough for many people, but they can’t compare to a personalized playlist made to suit your tastes. What’s more, there are ways to mix, match, and combine multiple Apple Music playlists to create a giant track list for every mood. You can also define specific rules such as “songs played at least 25 times” and/or “released in 1970 or earlier”, etc. to quickly create large self-updating playlists. We’re going to show you how to create smarter playlists for Apple Music using both official and third-party tools.
Create smart playlists in the Music app on iPhone.
The Apple Shortcuts app lets you create smart playlists on your iPhone without the need for third-party services. If you’re comfortable creating and modifying shortcuts on your phone, this method will serve you well. As an example, here is the iPhone shortcut for creating smart playlists in Apple Music . It was created by Ronald Langeveld , who optimized it to select the top 25 songs in your library and add them to a new playlist.
You can open the shortcut and customize or add various options to optimize it for your needs. You can even use the Automation tab in the Shortcuts app to automatically run this shortcut every day so that it keeps your playlist up to date.
Use third-party Apple Music apps to create smart playlists
Third-party Apple Music apps can do a lot that the stock app can’t. Both Marvis Pro ($6.99) and Soor ($6.99) let you create rule-based playlists effortlessly and are generally a better alternative to the stock Music app. Both of these apps add a lot of features and a much nicer interface, while retaining almost all of the typical Apple Music features.
If you’re happy with the stock music app and just want an easy way to create smart playlists, you can buy Miximum ($1.99), an app designed for the task.
The smart playlist features in all of these apps allow you to define a set of rules – like songs you’ve never played or songs of a certain length – to automatically create a playlist and create auto-updating playlists based on it. (With these apps, I created a custom playlist of 1,000 songs in less than 10 minutes.)
Create smart playlists with the Music app on Mac
If you have a Mac, its default Music app lets you create smart playlists. (Why Apple didn’t add this feature to the Music app on the iPhone is unclear.) On a Mac, open the Music app and choose File > New > Smart Playlist , or use the keyboard shortcut Option + Command + N . to open the smart playlist window.
Here you can define all kinds of rules from the drop-down menus in the Matching section for the following rule . Use the + button to add more rules. Be sure to check the Real-time Update box to make sure your smart playlist is constantly updated. When you’re done, click OK .