Apple Music, like any other streaming service, allows users to mark the songs they like with a Love button (indicated by a heart icon). If you’ve loved a ton of songs from the Music app and are looking to play them on your iPhone, the following post will help you find your loved songs and create a playlist with all the songs you’ve marked with the heart icon.
Can you find loved songs on Apple Music on your iPhone?
No. Although Apple Music has a Love button to mark tracks that you like, this Love button (marked by a heart icon) helps Apple learn your listening habits so that it can offer you recommendations based on what you like to listen to. If you’ve tapped the Love button on songs you’ve listened to in the past and want to locate them inside Apple Music, you won’t be able to do that natively on your iPhone.
In contrast, Spotify offers a “Liked Songs” playlist that users can access inside the “Your Library” section of the Spotify app. For unknown reasons, Apple neither has such a playlist nor a section that shows you all the songs you’ve marked with the Love button.
How to find loved songs on Apple Music using a Mac or a Macbook
Note: You need to have an Apple macOS device (any Mac desktop or Macbook will do) PC for this.
While iPhone users won’t be able to find the songs they loved inside the Apple Music iPhone app, there’s still one way they can find them as long as they own a Mac with the Apple Music app installed on the PC. Unlike its iOS app, the Apple Music app on macOS can let you browse and play songs you’ve marked with the heart icon.
Note: This will only work if the songs you “loved” were added to your Apple Music library in the first place.
To find the songs you’ve loved, open the Apple Music app on your Mac. When the app opens, click on the Songs tab under “Library” from the left sidebar.
Here, you’d see all the songs you’ve added to your Apple Music library. Check if you have the Love column (marked by a heart icon) in the header row among other columns for Title, Time, Artist, Album, Genre, and Plays.
If you cannot find the Love column, right-click on any column’s header and select Love from the list that appears.
The Love option should be marked with a tick mark for it to show among other columns. To see all the songs you’ve loved inside Apple Music, click on the Love column header at the top.
You will now see all the songs you marked with the heart icon inside Apple Music and these songs will be highlighted by a heart icon under the Love column.
How to create a playlist of your loved songs on Apple Music using a Mac or a Macbook
Now that you know how to find your loved songs on Apple Music, you should now be able to play them from your Apple Music app on a Mac. If you wish to make it easier to play these songs, there’s a smarter way to do so – by creating a Smart Playlist on Apple Music.
You can create a Smart Playlist of all of your loved songs on Apple Music and with that, you’ll no longer need to browse for songs with a heart icon on your library since the service will itself recognize the songs you’ve marked with “Love” and add them to this playlist.
Creating a Smart Playlist
To create a smart playlist, open the Apple Music app on your Mac PC or Macbook. When the app opens, click on File from the Menu bar and go to New > Smart Playlist.
You’ll now see a Smart Playlist window appear on the screen. Here, you provide the app with your preferred criteria for selecting and adding songs to your playlist. To choose criteria, click on Artist as it will be selected by default under “Match for the following rule”.
Since you’re looking to add all your loved songs to this playlist, select Love from the list of options.
In the third dropdown box, select Loved.
Your search criteria will look something like this.
(Optional) If you wish to add more rules when searching for songs, you can click on the + icon on the right-hand side of the first rule.
From there, you can filter songs based on other factors like artist, album, category, genre, time, date, and more. For instance, we wanted to search for songs based on the number of plays, so we chose “Plays”. If you use the search criteria below, the Music app will add songs you loved that you played more than 5 times.
You can add any number of these rules and when you’re done adding them, click on Ok at the bottom right corner.
After setting the rule for loved songs, you need to make sure that the Live updating box remains checked.
If you wanted all the songs you loved on Apple Music using the “Love” rule as above, set this rule and click on Ok.
The Music app will now show you a new playlist and it will be labeled as “Playlist”. You can rename it to a name of your choice.
For instance, we set its title to “Songs I Love” so that we can recognize this specific playlist among others in our library.
Play loved songs from this new smart playlist (Mac / iPhone)
To play songs from this playlist in the future, open the Apple Music app and locate “Songs I Love” (or the name you set for your smart playlist) from the Playlist section of the left sidebar.
All the songs you’ve loved on your iPhone, Mac, or any other Apple device will now show up inside this playlist.
Since Apple syncs playlists via iCloud, you’ll be able to find this playlist on your iPhone. For that, open the Apple Music app on your iPhone.
When the app opens, tap on the Library tab at the bottom.
Inside Library, select Playlists at the very top.
The new smart playlist you create will appear at the top of the next screen. Tap on this playlist to open it.
All the songs you’ve loved on Apple Music will now appear on your iPhone as well.
Why do some songs don’t appear on my “Loved” list?
When you create a smart playlist of your loved songs, all the songs you marked with the heart icon should automatically be inside this playlist. If you think the list of songs you loved is incomplete and there are more songs that this playlist should have, then chances are you may not have added those songs to your Apple Music Library.
That’s because a smart playlist can only sort songs that are available in your library. If you had created a smart playlist for your loved songs using the above guide, the songs that appear inside that playlist will be the songs you “loved” and added to your library. The playlist won’t show songs you loved but didn’t add to your library.
You can avoid facing this issue by allowing Apple Music to add songs to your library when you add them to a playlist. You can do that on your iPhone by opening the Settings app and selecting Music.
Inside Music, turn on the Add Playlist Songs toggle to make sure all the songs you add to a playlist are added to your Apple Music library as well.
This may resolve the issue for songs you love in the future but for the past songs you loved, you will need to head back to each one of them and add them to your library.
That’s all you need to know about finding Loved songs on Apple Music.
