Working with Playlists

Although you can purchase and download songs directly from the iTunes Store on your iPhone, I’m going to assume that the vast majority of your music library is cooped up on your Mac or PC, and that you’re going to want to transfer that music to your iPhone. Or perhaps I should say that you’re going to want to transfer some of that music to the iPhone. Most of us now have multigigabyte music collections and, depending on the storage capacity of your iPhone and the amount of other content you’ve stuffed into it (particularly videos and movies), it’s likely that you only want to copy a subset of your music library.

If that’s the case, then iTunes gives you three choices when it comes to selecting which tunes to transfer: artist, genre, and playlists. The first two are self-explanatory, but it’s the last of these three where you can take control of syncing music to your iPhone.

A playlist is a collection of songs that are related in some way, and using your iTunes library, you can create customized playlists that include only the songs that you want to hear. For example, you might want to create a playlist of upbeat or festive songs to play during a party or celebration. Similarly, you might want to create a playlist of your current favorite songs.

Playlists are the perfect way to control music syncing for the iPhone, so before you start transferring tunes, consider creating a playlist or three in iTunes.

Creating a favorite tunes playlist for your iPhone

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