How to prevent the Library and Playlists from interfering with each other in Apple Music

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I'm looking for a way to prevent my Library and Playlists from interfering with each other, or at least maybe they could play well together.

Currently, I've erased everything from my Library in an attempt to solve this problem. I've got about 20 Apple Music Playlists. Currently, I've made all these playlists available for offline use.

I keep attempting different solutions to this problem:

If I choose to either + or ‘Make available offline’ any particular song from a playlist that is available offline, it goes into my Library.

However, when I remove any of these songs from my Library by ‘Remove from My Music’, playlists that contain these songs are no longer available offline. To make things worse, if I try to ‘Make available offline’ again, nothing happens. The playlist will not download again.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or if I'm doing something wrong.

I've found another unexpected behavior, if I add a song to my Library by clicking + on a song in a downloaded Playlist, it will appear in my Library. By all appearances, the song is available offline, but the context menu still gives me the option to ‘Make available offline’. I don't understand why this option is available to me, when the songs are already downloaded.

Here's an Imgur album I created to show how reproducible the problem is.

Best Answer

I am also a little confused but I think this information is correct:

  • A song that is in one of YOUR playlists must also be in your library
  • Therefore...if you add a song to a playlist, it will be added to your library
  • Therefore...if you remove a song from your library, it will be removed from any of your playlists that it was included in.
  • However...if you delete a playlist it does NOT delete the songs from your library

Also note that adding Apple Music playlists (i.e. not created by you) do NOT add songs to your library.

In my experience, this leads to my Library becoming unusable because it is a very long list of artists that only have 1 or 2 songs. I'm never sure if I can delete the songs from my library because I don't know whether the song is part of a playlist that I want to keep.

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