If you're not going to be connected to the internet, or if you're worried about your cellular data, you can choose to download songs, albums, and even entire playlists to your iPhone or iPad for offline listening.
Why download music instead of streaming it?
Streaming is awesome: You can listen to anything you want—Beats 1 included—at any time, and it doesn't take up valuable space on your device. But it comes at a cellular cost, especially if you have a smaller data plan. And even if you have a massive cellular plan, there are places where streaming music just doesn't make sense: airplanes, for instance, or camping trips.
Lucky for you, if you have an Apple Music subscription and iCloud Music Library enabled, you have the option to download any song, album, or playlist from its catalog for offline listening; if you use iTunes Match, you can download anything from your Mac's library on your iPhone or iPad.
Apple Music Subscription
Apple Music is Apple's massive music service, comprising a subscription music catalog, iCloud Music Library syncing across your devices, Beats 1 live and algorithmic radio, customized playlists, and more artist exclusives than you can shake a stick at.
How to automatically download content
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You can decide whether to have content automatically downloaded when it's selected for your library.
- Tap on the Settings app on your mobile device.
- Choose Music.
- Toggle Automatic Downloads under Downloads.
When this toggle is on, music selected going forwarded is automatically downloaded to that device. This setting has no bearing on your other devices.
Apple makes it easy to optimize music storage on your mobile device. To set up a minimum storage threshold:
- Tap on the Settings app on your mobile device.
- Choose Music.
- Tap Optimize Storage under Downloads.
- Set the minimum storage. Available levels are dependent on the amount of storage space on your device.
How to select/download content
The process to download content is slightly different whether downloads are performed automatically.
With automatic downloads:
- Open the Music app on your iPhone or iPad.
- Select the song or album you want to download.
- Tap the + or +Add button next to the song or album.
The music will automatically download to your device. After it's downloaded, you'll see albums marked as Downloaded.
With manual downloads:
- Open the Music app on your iPhone or iPad.
- Tap the + or + Add next to the song or album you'll like to add to your library.
- Tap the cloud icon to download the song or album.
How to view only downloaded music
To see only the content downloaded:
- Open the Music app on your iPhone or iPad.
- Tap the Library tab in the Music app on your mobile device.
- Select Download Music at the top of the screen.
Downloaded content is organized playlists, artists, albums, and songs.
How to delete downloaded music
To remove certain content from your mobile device:
- Open the Music app on your iPhone or iPad.
- Touch and hold the song or album that you've downloaded.
- Tap Remove.
- Choose Remove Downloads or Delete from Library depending on your preference.
To remove all music from your mobile device:
- Tap on the Settings app on your mobile device.
- Choose Music.
- Tap Downloaded Music.
- Tap Edit at the top right.
- Choose the red icon to the left of All Songs or individual songs.
- Tap Delete.Advantages: • There are two versions - the free version and the paid version. • It is fast and has the capability to re-size printed PDF files to a more email friendly size. However, the free version has almost identical features to the paid version. To print PDF with CutePDF printer, it is important to first install a PS2PDF converter which is a postsc_x_ript driver that supports to process PDF printing tasks. Printing with the CutePDF involves using the 'Print' button and selecting the destination folder to save the output file.
Content selected is now downloaded from your device. Note: The content is still part of your library, however.
What about the Mac?
To see songs downloaded on your Mac:
- Open the Music app on your macOS device.
- On the left side of the screen, click Songs.
- Click View on the Apple Toolbar.
- Under View, click Only Downloaded Music.
Now, only the songs downloaded in the Music app are shown.
Note: Beginning with macOS Catalina, the iTunes app on Mac has been replaced by the Music app.
Questions?
If you have additional questions about music on your devices be sure to leave your thoughts in the comments below.
Updated August 2019: Includes content for the iOS 13 beta.
Serenity Caldwell contributed to an earlier version of this guide.
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Figuring out how to download music on Apple Music for offline listening is fairly straight forward—tap the plus sign next to a song and then the cloud icon. While downloading individual songs or albums on Apple Music is easy to do, learning how to download all music on Apple Music isn’t so obvious. If you want to listen to your Apple Music offline, you’ll need a way to download all Apple Music at once. However, unlike Spotify, Apple Music doesn’t provide a clear Download All button to download your music for offline listening. We’ll first explain how it is that you can use Apple Music offline, then we’ll jump into how to download all music on Apple Music with iPhone or iPad. Let’s go.
Related: How to Delete Music from Your iPhone But Not From iTunes or iCloud Music Library
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Sign up to iPhone Life's Tip of the Day Newsletter and we'll send you a tip each day to save time and get the most out of your iPhone or iPad.
iCloud Music Library on iPhone with Apple Music allows you to amass a huge collection of songs without those songs taking up download space on your iPhone. But our iPhones have enough storage for most music listeners to keep their music downloaded for offline listening (music without need of Wi-Fi or data), if desired.
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Downloading your music to iPhone for offline listening is also a good way to save on cellular data. And, streaming your songs takes more battery life than listening offline. If you have the storage, it’s definitely worth downloading all of your songs.
Apple Music doesn’t currently offer a one-step solution to download all your songs for offline listening on your iPhone. But I have a workaround you can use, though you’ll need iTunes downloaded on a computer. If you’re trying to make all your music available offline in Apple Music, this is currently the easiest way to do it—at least until Apple hears our cries for a one-step way to download all songs at once. In the meantime, here’s how to make all your music available offline in Apple Music.
How to Download All Apple Music to iPhone Using iTunes
- Open iTunes on your computer.
- At the very top, select File, choose New, and click Smart Playlist.
- A box will pop up.
- Leave Match checked and Music selected.
- Select Time from the second drop down box and Is Greater Than in the second.
- Type 00:00; that way all your songs will be included since they are all longer than zero seconds.
- Make sure Limit to is unchecked.
- Check Live Updating so that new songs added to your iCloud Music Library are downloaded too.
- See the example below for clarification:
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- Give the playlist a name such as All Music.
- Now, since you have iCloud Music Library enabled on your computer and iPhone, grab your iPhone and open the Music app.
- Tap My Library. Select Playlists. And choose the playlist you just created in iTunes.
- Tap the cloud icon with a downward arrow that’s next to the album art at the top of your playlist. All of your music will begin to download.
Depending on the size of your collection, this could take a while. As stated above, I recommend keeping your iPhone plugged in and turning auto-lock off while all of your music downloads.
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How to Download All Music to iPhone without iTunes or a Computer
This method is going to take you awhile, but it’s certainly possible.
- In the Music app, tap the Library tab.
- From here, you can either select Songs or Albums.
- If you select songs, you’ll need to scroll through your list and tap the iCloud icon next to every song it appears by (that icon indicates the song isn’t downloaded).Make your greeting card special and personalized with this free greeting card creator for Mac. You can share your creations with your loved ones via email, share on Facebook, or take a print and send an old-school greeting card. Greeting Box makes it really easy to create customized greeting cards with its simple and intuitive interface. This application is a good free alternative for creating greeting cards if you don’t have iPhoto. Making cards on a mac for free. Features To Look For In Mac Greeting Card Software Templates & Graphics The number of included templates and graphics varies widely from program to program. We suggest avoiding programs with fewer than 5,000 templates and fewer than 10,000 graphics. Photos for Mac makes it ridiculously fun to create custom greeting cards and yearly newsletters.
- If you select Albums, you can go through and add each album to a playlist dedicated to all of your music. If you have an iPhone with 3D Touch, speed up the process a little by 3D-touching each album to jump right into adding it to a playlist.
- Once you’ve added all the albums to a playlist, go back and tap on Playlists.
- Find the playlist and open it. Then tap the iCloud icon at the top of the list.
- If you have a large library, it will take some time to download. So make sure you're using Wi-Fi to download all that music, and I recommend charging your iPhone during the process too. You may even want to do this overnight.
As I said, this is not the fast method. This will take time, but if you don’t have access to iTunes or a computer and you really want to download all of your Apple Music for offline listening, this method will work (with patience).
Make Sure All Future Music is Automatically Downloaded to Apple Music
Now that you’ve gone through the trouble of downloading all of your music to your iPhone, you probably don’t want to need to do all of this again. Well, you can turn on a setting in Music that makes it so all songs that are added to your iCloud Music Library automatically download to your device for offline listening. Here’s how to turn that setting on.
- Open the Settings app on iPhone.
- Tap Music.
- Under Downloads, toggle on Automatic Downloads.
Now, all of your future music will automatically download to your iPhone. Worried about it taking up too much space on your device? Use this tip to Optimize Storage for Apple Music.
Top Image Credit: GongTo / Shutterstock.com
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