First some background. Got an iPhone 11, I loaded up about 30-32G of music manually from my library. Had to do that running wnblowz on my m$ install on my 2010 cMP due to IT having a version of iTunes that worked to copy songs over (High Sierra iTunes 100% incapable). So I come to get a M4 Mini, 15,3,1 at this point. Now I had spent a LOT of time carefully curating that 30-32G down from my 80G overall collection of music. So that phone has an issue with it’s RFID chip (as in, it don’t work) so I have another 11. Had the bright idea to copy all the songs from one phone to the other. Except, there seems to be no way to do that. Oh, while I have about 7G free on that phone, I can not install any iOS 18 on it without deleting maybe another 3-5Gs.
Figured what I should do is create a playlist to sync. BUT it’s really about the size of the music collection. It seems Music does NOT list the overall size of a playlist, just the number of songs. Is there any way to get to that information?
So I’d like to compare my new playlist to what is on the phone. Problem is that when I look at the songs on my phone in Music, the list ALWAYS defaults to sort by song title. Is there anything I can do about that? I want it to sort by artist and I want it to STAY that way.
Lastly (for now, lol), when I am looking at my playlist, there is a HUGE section at the top, taking up about ⅓ of vertical heights at full screen. Like so:
Hopefully via playlists, not actually deleting files. I did this for years, when I was using a 4GB iPod Nano - I would set up various playlists (some smart some manual) so my 50+GB of music could rotate through the device.
Yes. On the menu bar, click View → Show Status Bar. You should then see the number of songs, total running time and byte-size of the playlist:
If you view a playlist, you will see the songs in the order of the playlist, which will depend on how you constructed it on your Mac.
But if, from the top-level of the iOS menu, you can tap on “Songs” and then tap on a “Sort” button in the upper-right corner. You can choose “Title”, “Recently Added” or “Artist” for the sort order:
Not nearly as nice as what Music on macOS can give you, but better than nothing.
No help here. I also hate this. You can hide the artwork in other views, but not for a playlist. If you’ve got a big enough monitor, it’s not too intrusive, but with a small screen, it’s a real pain in the neck.
Since you appear to be talking about how to cram 80GB of content onto a 30GB device, here’s a system of smart playlists that I used for a long time to populate small iPods.
I created a “weighted least recent” smart playlist that is designed to select songs I haven’t played recently. The songs with more stars get played more recently. It uses nested rules to make this happen:
Now, whenever you sync your device, the play-counts on your Mac will update and the smart playlists will recompute their contents, resulting in the played tracks being removed from your device, to be replaced with unplayed tracks.
Wow… got the size now…funny thing is it’s just about the overall size of what I have on my “old” phone!
Yes, I have things sorted the way I want in my Library and the Playlist, I was talking about looking at the song on the phone. One can order by clicking on the column headers, BUT as soon as you look anywhere else, it gets reset to alphabetize by song.
Mmmm, smart playlists eh? Back in the days of my 1G Shuffle (which had a facility to announce what song was coming up, I LOVED that, but the fruit killed it), I had a setup where if I played a song (I had them randomly shuffled as I like pretty much ever category of music, the Gregorian chants to trance), it would get removed the next time I synced… and it would add in songs to make up for the removals. And the one that got copied in had to have zero plays. I remember at least once of running out of songs to add to the Shuffle… all I did was reset the play counts back to zero. No idea if I can even do that.
I’ll have to see how I can deal with that at some future point.
Can’t thank you enough David!
Ugh, they don’t sort the same… Looking at my phone’s list I see Abdullah Ibrahim sorted to the top (artist sorting). BUT on the playlist, he is sorted under the Is. Everything else seems by the first letter of the artists name. AND another annoyance is in the playlist view, it sorts by artists, then album. Looking at the phone’s list it jumbles up the albums in artist sort.
Oh, just discovered I can pop out the Playlist in a new window, so I can looks at the Plylist and what I have on the phone without switching…
One last thing I am VERY sorry to lose an old utility from iTunes/AppleScript days… it would go through all the music and adjust for even playback level… worked great and was SO useful.
Yes. The iOS Music app is missing a lot of useful sort options.
On a Mac, if you repeatedly click the top of the “Album” column, it will cycle between sorting by:
Album - by the album title (or Sort Album), and by disc/track within each album.
Album by Artist - by artist (or Sort Artist, or Album Artist or Sort Album Artist), by album (or Sort Album) within each artist, and disc/track within each album
Album by Artist/Year - by artist (or Sort Artist or Album Artist or Sort Album Artist), by year within each artist, by album (or Sort Album) with within each artist/year, and disc/track within each album
I prefer the latter for my system.
On iOS, you can only sort by album title. If you sort by artist, it groups albums together, but sorts the albums by title, not by year. If you tap on the “Artists” view at the top-level menu, it does sort albums within each artist by year.
But iOS seems to sometimes (but not consistently) get confused about whether an artist should be sorted by the Artist field or the Sort Artist field. Which is really annoying, because I use the Sort Artist field to put last-name-first. (e.g. when the Artist is “Billy Joel”, the Sort Artist is “Joel, Billy”). On my device, I see Billy Joel sort properly with “Jo…”. But Elton John (whose Sort Artist field is “John, Elton”) sorts with “El…” - which is flat-out wrong.
I’ve long since given up sending Apple bug reports about this sort of thing. If anyone even cares, they haven’t fixed these bugs that have existed for many years. I treat the Music database on my Mac is the master copy and just put up with whatever mess iOS’s Music app makes of it.
The only thing I do n iOS is launch the app, then start playing. I think it’s set for shuffle as that’s what I like… Preservation Hall Jazz band followed by Eminem, followed by Beethoven’s 9th. ALL my “arranging” happen on the desktop M4 Mini.
Remember I was talking about the list resen. ted to me from the phone’s Library. Double clicking on the Album header simply reverses the order of the sort. In my Library (sort by Artist) it seems to do Artist/Album sorting. Just the way I like it .
Another question, while I’m not quite ready to try the sync, is the “Sync Settings” in the Playlist view what is used to kick off a sync? By its name I would think it’s JUST for setting some parameters with another button there to start the actual sync? Which seems odd as I WOULD think it was the phone list that has the sync function, not the Playlist I am wanting to sync.
I find it interesting that you want it to include one-star tracks. If I rate a track as one star, that means “I don’t ever want this track to play unless I specifically play this track”. It’s for tracks that I don’t want to delete for any of a variety of reasons, but I still want Music to organize them. And the Smart Playlists I play from all exclude one-star tracks.
You and I have different definitions for what one star means.
There is nothing in my library that I would never want to hear. One-star tracks are things that are my least-favorite, but are still fair game for listening.
If there’s something I consider so bad that I never want to hear it, it will be deleted from the library (or more likely, never be ripped in the first place). And yes, I own a few albums that fit this category - the CDs are on my shelf, and the tracks are not on my Mac.
Fair enough, but I didn’t say I never wanted to hear these tracks. I just don’t want them to come up unless I deliberately play them.
Many of them are interstitial tracks on albums that I want to be included when I listen to the album straight through, such as introductions on live albums, but that I don’t want to come up as random tracks by themselves. I don’t attach the intros to the tracks they go with (and manually separate them when they come that way, especially since many live albums put the intro to a track on the end of the preceding track) because in playlists, I want to hear the songs, not the talking.
I find using the rating for this easier than putting a note in the comments. You can adjust ratings without going into Get Info, and comments can get cluttered with other notes. I don’t use the checkmarks for this either, because I use those for other purposes ad hoc.
I’ll also mention that I’m a completist. I really don’t like having albums incomplete in my collection. Yes, all the tracks are still on the CDs (for those that I bought as CDs), but my CDs are all in storage boxes that I can’t casually access. So unless a track is so horrible that I don’t want to hear it even as part of the album (and there are a few of those), I would prefer to keep it in my collection and have it excluded from smart playlists.
I wasn’t trying to criticize your use of one-star ratings. I just find it interesting the different ways different people use metadata in their music collections, especially when trying to make distinctions that there aren’t metadata fields specifically for.
One field I wish Apple would add is a “keywords” field. A list of arbitrary keywords which may be used for searching and filtering.
Today, I use the “grouping” field for this, using a comma-separated list of keywords. Which works, but the iOS music player sometimes (not consistently) will group tracks that have identical text in this field.
I suppose I could use the Comments field for this, but then I’d have to deal with the possibility of smart playlists selecting tracks based on other text in that field.
And it shouldn’t be hard for Apple to do. I assume the ID3 standard allows for new/custom tags (e.g. the ones Apple created for tracking store purchases), so that wouldn’t be a big deal. Internally, the ID3 can store keywords as just another text field using a delimiter (maybe a newline character) character between keywords. in the Music app, it could be presented as a scrolling list of checkboxes, with an option to edit the list of choices. (FileMaker has had a UI element for this for a very long time.)
I gave up on ratings in the early days because if I can’t have separate ratings for the piece and the performance there’s no point in bothering.
These days, I only play specific things and almost never want music or other sounds in the background. My head has music going all the time, and not having constant external input allows a wide variety of things to pop up from the past that I’d never think to go looking for:
Classical, jazz and world traditional music (parents), opera tunes (cartoons), music from school, music from the TV variety shows, ‘music’ that other undergrads subjected me to, music from concerts, lots of music from earlier radio listening. I own almost none of it, and Apple music doesn’t have a lot of the world music, much of which was from long gone tiny labels. Sadly, there are also sometimes commercial jingles. But even those can give a (tiny) nostalgia hit.
Try a week or three of silence and see what pops up!
