I’ve heard I can use Playlisty to get access to my Apple Music “Loved” tracks. How?

If you are used to Spotify you will probably be used to the functionality it offers where “Liking” a track causes it to get automatically added to a “Liked Songs” playlist.

At the time of writing, no such functionality exists on Apple Music and if you “Love” an Apple Music track and forget to also add it to a playlist or your library, there’s no easy way to find the track again. If you’ve already “Loved” hundreds of tracks before realising this it can be very frustrating.

Luckily there is a workaround. It’s easy, but it does take a bit of time while you wait for Apple to do their thing. This is how you do it:

  1. Log-on to https://privacy.apple.com using the Apple Id that you use for Apple Music (this is very important – if you use different Ids for Apple Music & iCloud)
  2. Select “Obtain a copy of your data” and then “Apple Media Services information”. Then “Continue”.
  3. Choose a maximum file size (the minimum of 1Gb should be fine) and then “Complete request”.
  4. Wait. For a day or two. Or three. Keep checking back here: https://privacy.apple.com/account to see if your file is ready for download.
  5. Once it is ready, download your file (it is called “Apple Media Services information.zip”) and unzip it (easiest on a Mac or PC).
  6. Next, find the file “Apple_Media_Services.zip”, unzip it and then open the folder “Apple Music Activity”.
  7. Find the file “Apple Music Likes and Dislikes.csv” and put it somewhere where Playlisty can open it e.g. on a Mac leave it in the Downloads folder; on an iPad or iPhone, put it somewhere on your iCloud or DropBox drive.
  8. Open Playlisty, select the “Files” tab and add the “Apple Music Likes and Dislikes.csv” file. Hit “Next…” and let Playlisty do the rest.

Sorry if that sounds complicated – it really is not, but you do have to wait a while for Apple to get your data together. Hopefully a future version of Apple Music will make this all unnecessary.