How To Use Apple Music With Your ITunes Music Collection

How to Add Music to Apple Music or iTunes

Although we’re in an age of streaming, it’s still common to have music files on your computer that you want to add to iTunes or the Apple Music app. You might have ripped these files from a CD, downloaded them online, or produced them yourself.

Wherever you got your music files from, all you need to do is drag and drop them into the Apple Music or iTunes window to add them to your library. Make sure you drop the songs in the Library section of the sidebar.

Alternatively, go to File > Import from the menu bar and select your files in the resulting file browser. Your computer copies the files to the correct directory and adds them to your library.

How to Upload Your Music to Apple Music or iTunes

Importing music to iTunes or the Apple Music app is the first step, but you still need to upload your music to the cloud so you can access it on your other devices. This is only possible with an Apple Music or iTunes Match subscription.

With an Apple Music subscription, you can stream or download any of the millions of songs available from Apple. It also lets you upload your own music to the cloud so you can stream or download it from your other devices.

iTunes Match is cheaper than Apple Music. While it lets you upload and sync your personal music collection, it doesn’t let you stream or download other music from Apple. This is the best option if you already own all the music you want to listen to and don’t plan to stream or download any new songs.

Whether you go for Apple Music or iTunes Match, Apple treats your uploaded music in the same way:

It tries to match every song in your library with existing tracks in Apple Music or on the iTunes Store. Any songs that match Apple’s library don’t get uploaded. Instead, Apple lets you download or stream the existing version of that song from Apple Music.

Music that doesn’t match existing tracks in iTunes or Apple Music gets uploaded instead. Apple limits each user to 100,000 uploads, each with a 200MB file size limit.

Upload File Quality

If Apple can’t match your song to an existing track in iTunes or Apple Music, it uploads that song from your computer in its original quality. In contrast, any music that Apple does match with iTunes or Apple Music gets converted to 256kbps quality.

In most cases, this will be an upgrade. However, if you have particularly high-quality original files, you may want to stop Apple from matching them and reducing the quality.

This is unlikely to be the case unless you intentionally keep your music in a lossless audio format such as WAV, AIFF, or FLAC.

The easiest way to keep Apple from matching songs in your iTunes or Apple Music library is by changing the metadata. Right-click on the tracks you want to keep and click Get Info. Then change the song title or the album name so it won’t match what’s on Apple’s servers.

For example, you could add [HQ] to the end of an album name. That way you’ll know it’s high-quality audio and it won’t match the album name on Apple Music or iTunes.

How to Sync Your Apple Music or iTunes Library

After adding music to Apple Music or iTunes, you need to sync your library to upload that music to the cloud and make it available on other devices. This is as simple as enabling a particular setting, which Apple turns on by default.

You can sync your music library across a maximum of 10 devices at once.

Sync Music From Your Computer

On a Mac, open Apple Music (or iTunes on macOS Mojave and earlier) and press Cmd + Comma to open its Preferences. At the top of the General tab, turn on the option to Sync Library, then click OK to confirm your settings.

On a Windows PC, open iTunes and go to File > Preferences from the menu bar. At the top of the General preferences, turn on the option to Sync Library, then click OK to confirm your settings.

Sync Music to Your Smartphone

You can only add your own music to iTunes or Apple Music from a computer. But after you upload this music, you can sync it to the Apple Music app on your mobile devices.

When you tell your mobile device to sync your Apple Music library, it deletes all the existing music on your device first. These files should still be available on the computer you originally synced them from. Simply add them to iTunes or Apple Music from that computer to sync them to your library and get them back on your device.

On an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, open the Settings app and go to Music. Turn on the option to Sync Library.

On an Android device, the Apple Music app automatically syncs your music library.