A couple of weeks ago, Apple Music added a new feature call My Favorites Mix to the For You section of the music service. This uses an algorithm to add songs to a weekly updated playlist, which is based on the music you play and love and other music Apple believes you will like. My list has been great, but you can help yourself and fine-tune it to be even better.
The easiest way to tell Apple the music you enjoy is to “Love” a song. In iOS you can do that in a number of ways, including tapping the “…” on the Now Playing page and then tap Love. This is a clear indication to the service that you want to hear more songs like the currently playing track.
I use the Love feature every chance I get so Apple Music and the For You section will always be in tune with my specific musical tastes. Apple outlined the advantages to doing this in an article on BuzzFeed earlier this week:
deep historical knowledge of individual users’ tastes and habits, based on years of data carried over from iTunes.
If you gave high ratings to a song or album in your old iTunes library, or just played it a lot more than others, you’ll find that behavior reflected in your My Favorites Mix.
This is good information to know, but it also brings up a slight problem for many users, including for me.
You used to be able to Love a song directly from the lock screen on the iPhone. With iOS 10, Apple took away that feature, which means that instead of tapping on the lock screen and then tapping Love, you know have to unlock your phone; open Apple Music; go to the Now Playing screen; tap “…” and then tap Love.
While Apple says that ratings are also important, they have completely removed ratings from the iOS version of Apple Music. You can still go to your Mac and rate songs, but not everyone is going to do that. I do.
Clearly you can’t Love songs while you’re driving or doing some other tasks, so I always looked back in the history of music that had been played and catch up on the songs I wanted to Love. Sadly, Apple removed the history feature from Apple Music on iOS as well, so you can’t do that.
Removing features like that seems counter-productive to what Apple wants you to do to improve the service, and how the service gets better for individual listeners.
Still, if you want to improve the My Favorites Mix, Love the songs you love. You will notice an improvement.
It looks like you can tell Siri to love the current song from the lock screen.
might want to look a little more Jim.. I’m finding things I thought were gone are still there.. they just hid them so well, it was hard to find.
an example is the repeat and shuffle options and the playlist.. I had NO idea you have to slide UP on the album art to drag the screen and show the options and playlist.. They really need some kind of indicator to show users this..
I like it, its actually cool, but discoverability is a real issue. Some type of ship up arrow on the right or left side of the art might have helped.
I signed up just to post this.
Jim, you’re 100% right. Although I like a lot of the changes in iOS 10 Music, there are some that I don’t like. Jim, you may be one of few people who can strongly suggest, no, encourage Apple to revert or fix some of these things.
Put back the LOVE button from the Lock Screen, and for that matter the Control Center. There is no good way to Love a song, without having to unlock the phone and press / take four other steps.
Why can’t I see a history of my recently played songs? There’s no way to go back to look at the song you’ve may have liked, there’s no way to go back and Love songs you’ve listed to.
Jim, you can tell SIRI to Love the song played so it works when driving. For someone who has Apple Watch you can put Music complication on watch face. Tap it and tap … then Love. Easier than using iPhone.
You can also give a star rating with Siri.
What’s interesting is that on a 6th generation iPod touch, the ‘Love’ button is available from the lock screen, but from the iPhone it’s not.
Anyone know how to see all loved songs? My kids have been pressing the heart on some awful songs that are screwing up my ‘for you’ section
The playlist will show you all previously loved songs (so you could revert it if you need). It’ll also update on-the-fly so every newly loved song will immediately go to this smart playlist and every un-loved will go out of it. The smart playlist will automatically sync to your phone or tablet.
I’m not all-in Apple system, as I’m using iTunes on Windows and Apple Music on Android. But this trick works perfectly and on my phone I can easily put this “Loved” playlist on shuffle. But I also made a “Not Loved” playlist to have an automatically updated list of songs which I should get back into.
I never add something I dislike to my library, so these songs can be neutral at worst, but sometimes you don’t appreciate a song from the first time. So for me it also makes sense to put this “Not loved” list on shuffle and give a chance to the songs I either didn’t listen since I added them (like a whole album added to one song I loved), or I listened to them, but didn’t love them yet.
All in all smart playlists capability and their syncing with my remote devices is a magical feature of Apple music! I like for example to limit these Loved and Not-yet-loved lists to 45 minutes. Too bad you can’t use other playlists as conditions for the smart playlists if you want them to sync with your phone or tablet. I used this on my old iPod classic all the time with great results — like 100 tracks I heard least, shullfed and from this I was selecting a 45-minute “compilation”. I can’t do this in Apple Music – like have 100 random not-loved songs, but only from those which were listened to only 1 time. But it’s very good feature, anyway. Makes you feel much more independent, and not spoon-fed by the streaming service.
By the way: 35-45 minutes is the optimal period of one-time music listening for me. A longer period puts me out of my focus. It looks like old LP time limit was a good choice. I hate when CDs are packed to the roof (80 minutes) just because the can last that long. Usually such albums are just filler-packed. It’s like modt today’s movies just HAVE to be more than 2h30m without any artistic reason. I feel relieved when a movie begins and I see it’s 1h40m — because it means an artist (a director in this case) knows how to limit themselves and know what’s important. It’s so easy just to throw everything into the movie (or into the CD).
But I’m diversing so I’ll just stop here.
Best regards,
Rafal Ruta,
Poland
Can anyone help me with this question. I keep selecting ‘Love’ on songs I want to highlight, assuming this will help the Apple Service fine tune my ‘Recommendations’.
Now, I have also created Smartlists that follow rules on my PC (windows) with Itunes. I have created a smartlist called ‘Loved’ where all the Loved songs appear.
Problem is, this ‘Loved’ smartlist only displays songs that I love from ‘my library’. It doesn’t show me songs that I’ve Loved in general whilst listening to Apple music. I don’t want to clutter my library by adding too many songs. And i mainly click ‘Love’ to fine tune my recommendations.
So I guess my question is, if itunes own smart playlist cannot find my loved songs unless I add them to my library, Is there even any point in clicking ‘Love’ on random songs we come across on Apple music? Do these even contribute to fine tuning my recommendations unless I add them to my library? I should think not?
Hi Rafal,
I’ll paste a question here which I posted else where on this discussion. Do you think you could help me with it? Comment Follows:
Can anyone help me with this question. I keep selecting ‘Love’ on songs I want to highlight, assuming this will help the Apple Service fine tune my ‘Recommendations’.
Now, I have also created Smartlists that follow rules on my PC (windows) with Itunes. I have created a smartlist called ‘Loved’ where all the Loved songs appear.
Problem is, this ‘Loved’ smartlist only displays songs that I love from ‘my library’. It doesn’t show me songs that I’ve Loved in general whilst listening to Apple music. I don’t want to clutter my library by adding too many songs. And i mainly click ‘Love’ to fine tune my recommendations.
So I guess my question is, if itunes own smart playlist cannot find my loved songs unless I add them to my library, Is there even any point in clicking ‘Love’ on random songs we come across on Apple music? Do these even contribute to fine tuning my recommendations unless I add them to my library? I should think not?
Also, I don’t want to go through the double effort of clicking love, and then also adding it to my library. If I flag an item, I should be able to retrieve it whenever I like, without adding it to my library.
Thanks!
Dear Jake,
For 2 weeks I’m not on Apple Music anymore — also for the reason you described. I googled a bit and it seems that only the songs already in your library can be a result in smart playlists. Look here, for example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/3bprla/apple_music_where_do_i_find_my_loved_little_heart/
I also don’t want to clutter my library with every loose song I initially liked. I want to have them saved in a separate playlist to check whole albums or artists later.
I switched to Spotify. It doesn’t have any decent “external” file management, but Google Music has a free storage for 50.000 songs. And overall pleasure from use is much better in Spotify for me. Playlist are longer in Spotify, which I ike more than album-length Apple Music playlists. And automatic recommendations in Spotify are killers for me! Discover Weekly, Release Radar and My Daily Mixes just know me better than my lover would do! They recommend me so much personal (and also obscure) stuff that it’s jsut unbelievable. It’s OK that I have 50 playlists in “For You” section of Apple Music (and 5 ones more every day), but who would be able to “eat” that all? Spotify’s attitude to recommendations (two 25-song automatic playlists per week) + all those “regular” album and playlist recommendations are much more “digestible”.
And one more thing — much of the music I like has “gapless” albums — electronic, prog rock, etc. Only Spotify has proper gapless playback on mobile devices. Apple Music, Deezer, Google Music — al have those terrible 1-second breaks which are deal-breakers for me. I can’t stand listrning to Pink Floyd, Marillion, Jean-Michel Jarre, Klaus Schulze or Mike Oldfield with their beautiful “flow” broken into pieces and waking me up from my own “flow”. I can’t believe that in 2017 iPhones don’t support the feature which my 10-year old iPod classic from 2007 takes for granted.
I wanted to love Apple Music, but for 2 weeks I just see (without focusing on any specific aspect) that I just have more fun from using Spotify. I just focus much more on listening to the music than on organizing it all the time.
Best regards,
Rafal
Dear Jake,
Please check out my reply right on your blog.
Best regards,
Rafal Ruta
2017-02-06 10:27 GMT+01:00 Disqus notifications@disqus.net: