My 'Library' in Apple Music is too cluttered for the following reason: whenever I add a song, the corresponding album and artist are also added. Similarly, whenever I add an album, all the individual songs of the album are added as well.
As a result, my library is filled with Artists and Albums that I am not interested in and that are there just because I added on the fly (usually through Shazzam) one song that I happened to like. This problem is compounded by the fact that Apple Music links the song to an arbitrarily chosen album, when the song could as legitimately be linked to another album.
Furthermore, the individual songs that I added because I like them individually are drowned among all the songs of all the albums that I added because I like the albums generally.
In order to sort the wheat from the chaff, I would like to see in the each of the three sections (songs, albums, artists) only the items that I did personally add to it, and hide those that were added there automatically because I added an item elsewhere.
For example, if I add 'Yellow submarine' to my songs, I do not want 'The Beatles' to appear among my Artists. I also do not want 'Revolver', '1' or 'The Red Album' to appear among my albums.
Similarly, if I do add 'Exile on Main Street' to my albums, I want neither all of its songs added to my songs nor 'The Rolling Stones' added to my Artists.
In a word, I want to see just what I added myself – no more, no less.
Is there a setting or a filter on Apple Music that could help me achieve this? If not, is there a third party app that could link with my library and allow the kind of filtering that I want?
I thank you in advance for your help and suggestions. W.
PS: I navigate Apple Music through iOS and macOS devices.
Best Answer
iTunes/Music manages your music library which you can access via various views. So if you add a track its artist will always show up in the Artist view, its album will always show up in Albums (and vice versa). The beauty of this is that you can choose to play all Madonna tracks by selecting her in the Artist view, or choose to play a specific album only by selecting it in the Album view.
Obviously this gets difficult to manage the more your library grows. I currently have over 40'000 tracks in iTunes/Music and found that it's much easier to manage if I use playlists to keep things in places where I find them again.