Browsing your library

- In this chapter, we're going to look at the Music and Video apps of iOS 9. Both apps work pretty much the same way across the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch and they allow you to carry around a lot of music and video content to keep yourself entertained while you're out and about. Exactly how much content depends on the capacity of your device and the size of your music and video files. But even the smallest capacity iOS device can hold hours of content. Now this chapter assumes that you've already synced your device with iTunes and copied the music and videos you want to it. If you don't know how to do this, go back and watch the chapter on syncing your device with your computer.

Alright, so I'll start by tapping Music on my iPhone to open the app. At this point you should see the five tabs or categories at the bottom of the screen. However, which categories you see and in what order they appear depends on whether you've signed up for Apple Music or not. Apple Music being Apple's subscription based music streaming and downloading service. I'm not going to get into all the ins and outs of Apple Music in this course. If you want to learn about it, check out my course Apple Music First Look. But for this chapter, I'm going to concentrate on showing you the Music app as it looks without subscribing to the service.

But even if you have subscribed to Apple Music, you'll still be able to follow along. It's just that some of the categories along the bottom will be in different places. But right now we're seeing My Music, For You, New, Radio, and Connect. If you're on a iPad, you'll see six categories down here instead of five, with the sixth one being Playlists. I'll show you how to get to Playlists on the iPhone in a moment. But the main tab you'll spend most of your time in if you want to listen to the music you've synced from your computer or purchased on your device is My Music. This is where your actual music collection lives.

All the other tabs here have to do with the music that you can stream or browse through the Apple Music service. So, under My Music, make sure Library is selected here at the top of the screen. This is how you can be sure you're browsing your entire collection. Below that we have the Recently Added section so you can easily access the music you've most recently copied to your device. You can tap Recently Added if you want to see more than just the most recent three items. I'll go back by tapping My Music. Now below that we see Artists. And this is where you can browse through the artists in your collection in alphabetical order.

Once you start scrolling down, the alphabetic index appears on the right side of the screen and you can slide your finger along it to jump to a letter so you don't have to scroll all the way down. Tap any artist to view the music you have by that artist. And from here you can browse their music by album. Tap any album to see its contents, and then tap any song to play it. ("Ruin Us" by The Jellybricks) I'm just going to pause that for the moment. I'll talk about the playback controls in its own video coming up.

Let's go back to the Artists page again by tapping My Music. Now for some artists, when you select them, you'll see two tabs above the album list. My Music is selected by default, and that shows you the music that exists on your device, the music that you synced from iTunes or purchased through the iTunes store. But in some cases, especially for major label and popular artists, you'll have this All tab as well. This lets you browse the Apple Music service so you can see all the songs, albums, and videos by this particular artist that are found on Apple Music. But if you try to play anything here and you're not a subscriber to Apple Music, you'll be prompted to sign up.

If you do want to subscribe, you can start with a three month free trial, but again, I'm not going to get into Apple Music here, so I'll tap Not Now. Alright, so that's how to browse by Artist. I'm going to tap My Music at the bottom of the screen again to jump back, and I'll scroll back up to the top by tapping the top of the screen. Now here I can tap where it says Artists and this is where you'll be able to browse your library by any of these other categories. So it I wanted to browse by Songs, for example, I can select that. And now all the songs on my device are listed alphabetically. One kind of annoying thing here, though, is if I choose to browse by Albums, by default it lists all of the albums but they're still organized by the artist's names.

So even though this first album is called "Charmer", it appears under "A" because the artist is Amy Mann. And "Pet Sounds" is a Beach Boys album so it's listed under "B". You can change this, though, by going out to Settings, Music, and here under Library tap Sort Albums. And you can change this to By Title. So now when I go back to Music, the albums are sorted by their names. And I think that makes a lot more sense. I generally browse by Artist, though, so I'll leave that selected.

Now at the top of the My Music screen you'll find the tab for Playlists. And this is where you can browse the Playlists you've created and synced from iTunes, as well as any playlists you've created on your device. Alright, so that's the gist of the My Music tab. And again, this is where you'll spend most of your time in the Music app if you're mainly concerned with playing the music you own. But let me give you a quick run-down of these other tabs. The next one here is For You. This is another part of the Apple Music service. If you subscribe, you'll see a customized collection of music that Apple thinks you might be interested in based on your preferences and tastes.

It's partially based on algorithms, but the playlists it recommends are hand-curated by real people. But again, you have to subscribe to see anything here. Next we have the New tab, which is also part of Apple Music. But you can actually see some content here. This is where you'll find just the new releases each week. And again, many of these items and lists have been hand-curated by Apple Music editors. But also, again, you can't play anything here unless you subscribe. Next we have Radio, and this is where you can find the service formerly known as iTunes radio, and which still functions very much like iTunes radio previously did.

But this is also where you can access Beats 1, the live 24-hour radio station hosted by real on-the-air DJs. One of the appeals of traditional radio is that you know you're listening to the same music at the same time as everyone else who's tuned into that station. And you can regain that feeling with Beats 1. And surprise, you can actually listen to music here without subscribing to Apple Music. Just tap "Listen Now" to tune into Beats 1 Radio. ("Turn the Music Louder" by KDA) Let's pause that. And I'll tap the arrow in the upper left-hand corner to collapse that view.

Now if you're looking for some other music, you can scroll down to tune into other radio stations. ("Locked Away" by Rock City) So if you're looking for some new music, Radio is a good place to go. And lastly we have the Connect tab. Connect is a social channel where artists can connect with their fans by posting updates, links, and audio and video clips. You can choose which artists to follow, and from that point, you'll be able to see the items they post, kind of like the way you can see posts and updates on services like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Of course, how much you see here is going to depend on how many artist and fans use Connect, but it's free to follow any artist. So it doesn't really hurt to follow a few and then check out the Connect tab occasionally to see if your favorite artists have posted anything. You can follow artists from right here on the initial Connect page just by tapping Follow or you can also go back to My Music and select one of the artists from your library. And on their main page, you'll find a Follow button here as well, in most cases. Let's go back to the Connect tab. I'll say that I'm done with my initial setup here by tapping Done.

And at that point on, anytime you go back to the Connect tab you'll see posts by the artists you're following if they've been adding posts. And you can scroll through them on this feed. So that's a basic run-down of the Music app. It should be pretty clear by now that much of it is geared towards getting you to subscribe to Apple Music, which I honestly think is a great service. But if you don't want to pay $9.99 every month for access to the entire Apple Music Library, you can stick to the My Music tab to listen to your own music at any time and without an internet connection. Or if you want to go a step further, you can go back to your Music Settings and here at the top you can switch off Show Apple Music.

Now if I go back to the Music app, notice all the Apple Music related buttons at the bottom are gone. We don't see the For You or the New tab. Instead, we have My Music, Playlists, which is now its own section instead of being a tab in the My Music section. And you still have access to the Radio feature including Beats 1 and Connect. But now your Music app is much less cluttered. And if I go back to an artist on My Music page here, I only see the music I actually own and have synced to my iPhone. There's no longer an All section here where I can browse for other music by this artist.

So it's a much cleaner look overall. So again, if you don't subscribe to Apple Music, you'll probably want to flip this switch in Settings to hide anything related to it. Okay, so that's how to browse and customize the Music app. In the next movie, we'll look more closely at the options you have when playing music.