Today I'm going to show you how to add
your own custom songs to the Apple Music
app. Maybe you found a live concert
recording or a soundtrack that isn't on
Apple Music that you'd still like to
listen to. All you need to do is
download your music in AAC, AIFF, MP3,
or Wave formats. Download them on your
Mac or your PC running iTunes. And it's
as simple as selecting all the files,
which are probably in your downloads
folder, and dragging them into the music
app.
If for some weird reason that doesn't
work, you can also go to the music app
or iTunes and then go to file, import,
and then select the music that way.
Then you'll see it in the recently added
section. Right click on it, and then
click get info. And you can add in all
of the metadata you might want to add,
like the name of the album, the name of
the artist, the year it came out, the
genre, the number of tracks. Click okay
when you're done. And if you have an
image you want to use as the album
artwork, you can go to the artwork tab
and just drag an image in. Here's a
picture I happened to take while I was
at this concert. It's not very good, but
it represents the concert. I'm going to
use that as the album artwork, so I just
drag it in. And there you go. You'll
also see that the names of the music
tracks aren't correct. And you can do
the same thing. Right click on them,
click get info, and then you can go in
and add the track title along with the
track number. It's a little tedious, but
it could be worth it if you have a
favorite concert you'd like to listen to
all the time.
There are a few downsides. You can't add
custom music to a shared playlist, only
music that exists in the Apple Music
catalog. Custom music also doesn't
appear in Apple Music replay at the end
of the year. So, your stats like top
artist, top album, and top songs for the
month and year won't be accurate. Now,
you can technically do this on Spotify
as well, but the process isn't nearly as
easy. It's one of the top reasons I stay
with Apple Music. I'm Dearan Jones with
Cult of Mac.