These Apple Music tips and tricks unearth the secret features of the built-in Music app on your iPhone, iPad, Mac and other devices that everyone should be using.
Apple’s built-in Music app allows you to listen to music on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. If you use the app, be sure to watch our tips which may unearth lesser-known or hidden features that you may not be familiar with.
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1. Turn on automatic downloads for offline listening
Head to Settings → Apps → Music and turn on Automatic Downloads so that every song or album you add to your library is automatically downloaded for offline listening. If your iPhone is low on storage, toggle this off to stream your music instead.
2. Manage storage settings for lossless audio
Go to Settings → Apps → Music → Audio Quality, and turn on lossless audio. Like RAW images, the lossless audio format preserves every detail of the original audio (24-bit/192 kHz) without clipping out hard-to-hear frequencies.
Most of the Apple Music catalog is available in the lossless format. However, lossless streaming consumes significantly more bandwidth. Besides, downloading songs in the lossless format for offline listening will strain your device storage much more than the regular quality.
Thankfully, you can manage audio quality separately for offline downloads, cellular, and Wi-Fi streaming after enabling lossless audio. For instance, you could configure your iPhone so that it never downloads lossless music and restrict lossless streaming to Wi-Fi connections.
Lossless audio only works with wired headphones. Be sure to turn off lossless audio if you have AirPods or other wireless headphones because it’s not worth the extra space and bandwidth.
3. Adjust your EQ settings
Not many people know they can change how their music sounds by playing with an equalization (EQ) setting. In Settings → Apps → Music → EQ, you can choose between various audio presets, likePop, Hip-Hop, and Rock. In addition, some EQ presets are optimized for specific use cases, namely Increase Bass, Reduce Bass, Small Speakers, Treble Booster, Vocal Booster, and Spoken World.
The equalizer is turned off by default. We recommend cycling through the different equalizer presets whilst listening to a song to instantly hear the difference.
4. Turn on spatial audio
Almost entire Apple Music catalog is available in Dolby Atmos. While artists must re-mix their old work for this multi-channel audio format, many new albums are recorded in Dolby Atmos by default.
Dolby Atmos lets you enjoy Apple Music in spatial audio. Spatial audio is Apple’s fancy marketing term for an algorithm that applies various audio filters and effects to better separate vocals and instruments.
Navigate to Settings → Apps → Music → Dolby Atmos, and choose Automatic to turn spatial audio on. Doing so will force the Music app to play a song’s Dolby Atmos version (if available) when using compatible headphones such as AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, and some Beats products. Spatial audio doesn’t work via the iPhone’s built-in speaker. To toggle spatial audio, touch and hold the volume slider in the Control Center to access hidden options.
5. Manage sections at the top of your library
The Library tab in the Music app provides the Playlists, Artists, Albums, and Songs shortcuts alongside the top. But did you know that you can customize these?
Silly tap the three-dotted menu in the top-right corner and choose Edit Sections, then toggle individual sections like Playlists, Artists, Albums, Made For You, Songs, TV & Movies, Music Videos, Genres, Compilations, Composers, Downloaded or Home Sharing.
6. Sort your song list
By default, the Music app sorts your music by artist, but wouldn’t it be great if you could browse your music alphabetically? To do so, switch to the Library tab and hit Songs at the top, the hit the three-dotted button near the top-right corner and choose your sorting order: Title (alphabetical order), Date Added (from the most recent additions to the oldest ), or Artist (alphabetical order).
7. Sing along to your favorite music
Many Apple Music songs have embedded time-synced lyrics. To show them, start listening to a song and switch to the Now Playing screen.
To bring up animated lyrics, touch the icon in the bottom-left corner. You can now touch a line to jump to that part of the song. To share four lines of lyrics, touch the three-dotted (…) menu on the lyrics screen (or touch and hold the lyrics), then choose Share Lyrics.
8. Jump to a song’s album quickly
To jump to a song’s album quickly, touch and hold a song and select Go to Album or hit album artwork displayed at the top of the contextual menu. The album view initially only displays a list of songs you’ve added to your library. To reveal the entire album track list, hit Show Complete Album at the bottom.
9. Create custom stations
Back in the iTunes days, a feature dubbed Genius provided personalized recommendations based on the content of your music library and other factors. iTunes is no more, but the idea behind Genius lives on.
To hear music similar to whatever you’re currently listening to, hit the three-dotted (…) menu on the Now Playing screen and select Create Station.
Alternatively, bring up Siri and say something along the lines of “Hey Siri, start a station from,” followed by the name of a song, artist, or genre.
10. Inline Up Next shortcuts
The Music app has a dynamic list of songs that will play next, aptly named Up Next. To see your Up Next queue, touch the icon in the lower-right corner of the Now Playing screen, which resembles three bulleted lines. You can drag tracks here to reorder the Up Next queue to your liking. To remove a song from Up Next, swipe left over it and hit the Delete icon.
11. Custom images in playlists
You can also upload a custom cover image to make your playlist easier to distinguish visually. Select Playlists under the Library tab and choose one of your own playlists, then hit the three-dotted (…) menu and choose Edit. Not, touch the Camera button to reveal options for taking a photo or choosing an image from your library to use as playlist artwork.
12. Sort your playlists
Folks who have lots of playlists might want to sort them alphabetically for easier browsing. Hit the three-dotted (…) menu on the playlist screen and select whether to sort the playlists by Title, Date Added, Last Played Date, Updated Date, and Playlist Type.
On older iOS versions, you can only browse playlist in the order you’ve added them.
13. Search music by mood
Instead of using keywords to find the right song, sometimes you just want for music to match your mood. Thankfully, Apple’s editors have created hundreds of mood-based playlists. For even richer results, go to the Search tab and enter a mood-based keyword like Romance, Calm, or Party to get a list of relevant songs that match that theme.
14. The New Music Mix playlist keeps you in the loop
Aside from playlists created by human experts, Apple Music provides algorithmically-created playlists which are dynamically updated and personalized just for you. For example, one such playlists brings the best of what your friends are listening to.
You can explore these playlists to discover something new. To do so, select the Home tab in the Music app and touch the heading labeled Made for You, then choose the New Music Mix playlist.
This playlist, updated every Friday, exposes you to new music from artists that Apple’s algorithm thinks you’ll love. Feel free to explore other personalized playlists, including Heavy Rotation, Favorites Mix, Get Up! Mix, Chill Mix, Friends Mix, and others.
15. Don’t forget about the top charts
One of the best ways to discover new music are Apple Music charts that list the most-streamed songs. This is a great way to discover the day’s most popular songs.
Select the New tab and scroll all the way down, then choose Charts. Now, touch the Daily Top 100 heading to see what’s trending globally or in each country separately. If you’d like to check out what’s popular in over a hundred cities around the world, select the City Charts heading instead.
Alternatively, explore the top songs, albums, music videos, or playlists by selecting corresponding headings (Top Songs, Top Albums, Top Videos, and Top Playlists). These charts include songs across many musical genres. To view genre-based charts instead, hit All Genres in the top-right corner and select a specific genre such as Rock or K-Pop.
16. Stream live radio
Apple Music supports live streaming of broadcast radio stations that are a part of the iHeartRadio brand. This is a great way to follow your local radio stations in the Music app. To get started, hit the Search tab and enter the radio station’s name, call sign, frequency, or nickname. You can also ask Siri to stream a live radio station.
17. Fullscreen album art on the lock screen
The Music app lets you switch between a standard Now Playing panel on the lock screen and an expanded version that fills up the screen with album art. Hit the small album cover image in the Now Playing controls on the lock screen to switch to the fullscreen player. In this mode, the album artwork is much bigger, and the color of the background and player controls matches the album art.
To go back to the default view, hit the cover image again.
The Music app isn’t that bad after all
We hope you’ve learned something new by watching our Apple Music video tips. The Music app could be better designed—especially as some of its features are buried deep in menus or too difficult to discover on your own—so you’ll need all the help you can get.
Armed with the knowledge in this tutorial, you will be able to manage songs you love, discover something new to listen to in a myriad of ways, and personalize the Music app experience to your liking.
Check out next: How to create collaborative playlists on Apple Music