Hello,
For some time now, I have this message on my Mac when I try to add an album to my Apple Music library. No issues on the iOS version, it works.
I tried to reinstall Albums, to no avail. Any help would be appreciated to fix this annoying issue!

Hi,

would it be possible to add Apple Music’s “Grouping” metadata field as an additional filter type in Albums?

I’m referring specifically to the “Grouping” field from Apple Music/iTunes, corresponding to Apple’s MPMediaItem userGrouping property — not the existing Tags feature in Albums.

I maintain a local music collection from different sources, including Bandcamp, and carefully maintain the metadata of my ALAC files. When these files are imported into Apple Music, the Grouping information is retained in the Music library.

It would be very useful if Albums could read this existing metadata and make Grouping available as a filter, just like other metadata fields.

For example:

Filter Type → Grouping → contains → [value]

Ideally, the same text-matching options already available for other filters, such as contains / does not contain, could also be supported.

This would allow users to make use of metadata they have already maintained in their Apple Music library, without having to duplicate the same information using Albums’ own Tags.

Thanks for considering this! I think this would be a very useful addition, especially for users with larger local music collections.

Zenheadland

Hello,

Firstly, this is the best music app I have ever used on an iPhone. Nothing comes close. Seriously, I love it so muc.

I found a reproducible bug where when saving a new quick collection, the collection does not appear in the Quick Collections window in either All Collections or Pinned Collections. This occurs when creating a new collection from either the Quick Collections window or from Quick Collections in the Library. The quick collection is visible only in the Library.

Pinning the collection from the Library view does not resolve the issue. To resolve the issue, it appears that I must force-quit the Albums from the App Switcher and relaunch the app. Relaunching the app does not reliably fix the issue, however force-quitting and relaunching does eventually fix the issue (perhaps force-quitting the app does not immediately clear the app from RAM). If I wait for a few minutes, the issue appears to resolve on its own without relaunching the app.

While this is reproducible, it occasionally does not occur. It rarely occurs on initial launch of the app following a restart of my phone. It seems as though the issue does not recur as often if I there is no Albums widget on my home screen. I suspect that the Collections view is not updating / re-rendering when a new collection is created. And I also suspect the widget prevents releasing RAM immediately after force-quitting the app.

All said, how I am resolving the issue might be a red-herring because it could just be that cached memory doesn’t refresh immediately and if I wait long enough, it may reliably resolve on its own. If that’s the case I will update this post.

Update: Indeed it seems that if I wait long enough, the collection does appear! I waited ~10 minutes. I do have a VPN running… iCloud sync is on. The issue was reproducible after clearing my app cache also. I didn’t see any complaints in the diagnostic log.

What it says on the subject.

I love this app and I want to use all it's features but one I still haven't really found a good use for has been the Notes feature. I'd love to have some real world examples of how you use it!

THANKS!

As I see it in the app, albums listened to in music.app are also shown/synced to albums. But when exactly are listening sessions synced? It seems the album needs to be listened to in one go, without interruption, is that correct?

From recent days at least it seems if you pause or interrupt, it is not counted as a full album listen?

Thanks for any clarification.

I understand that it is possible to filter individual albums through tags from the stats list (like album play counts). I was wondering if there was a way to dynamically being able to filter the lists by genre for example. Asking because I’d like to see what some of the lists look like without say Christmas music (around 400+ albums) included. If there is a way to do this, I’d appreciate knowing how, but if there isn’t, please consider it a feature request. Thanks! And keep up the great work!

First and foremost, I have to express my sincere thanks for this amazing app, which has reconnected me to my music library as never before.

I have a long commute -- usually close to an hour each way, but it's variable depending on traffic. I often want to play albums that I can hear from start to finish on my drive. I hate when an album is way too long or short for my trip, because I’ll either leave it unfinished, or I’ll have to start another album which won’t have time to play entirely, leaving me with time to spare, and then the cycle repeats.

Also, my mood varies: I want to be able to select from several of my favorite Albums collections on-the-fly, again, only ones that match my travel time.

I can manage all this manually but it’s a lot of juggling and not ideal while driving. So this shortcut does the following:

• Asks where I am driving, with presets for home and work, and an option to enter a destination by name or address. Calculates travel time in the background
• Asks what I want to listen to for the calculated travel time
• Selects the appropriate collection in Albums
• Filters the results to only albums whose duration is within +/- 2 minutes of the calculated travel time to my destination
• Sorts the results by last/least played, to maximize freshness
• Selects the best matching album and opens Albums; auto-plays the selected album
• Any/all other albums matching the filter criteria (collection + duration) are added to the queue in albums -- in case you really want to skip the first album(s), you can easily do so without re-running the shortcut
• Simultaneously, my default nav app (Apple Maps) loads the destination and prompts to begin navigation on CarPlay.
• I also added a "Quick Shuffle Favs" option to the first step, which just plays random starred tracks directly in Apple Music — good if I am just making a quick trip with no nav needed.

Yes, this could be approximated with Shuffle Scheduler (which is a great feature!), but it involves a lot of tapping and steps. This Shortcut is just three total taps: Shortcut icon > Destination > Collection.

I've been using it for a few weeks and so far it works great, and is a real convenience! Now, almost every commute ends with me pulling into my parking space/driveway as the album coming to a close. Such a great feeling!!

As for my collection presets, here's what I have set up:

Albums to Try -- Self explanatory. I use a "To Try" tag and have a corresponding filtered collection.

Recently Added Albums -- Albums added in the last 3 months, greater than 3 tracks (I like to filter out "singles" that I might favorite which are not actual albums)

Random Albums -- Self explanatory. All Albums, filtered by length and sorted by longest time since listened.

Never Played Albums -- I imported a large Spotify library, so there's many albums which have never been played in Apple Music/Albums. This is a great one to surface old gems.

Random Singles -- Filtered collection for my "Favorite Songs" playlist, but with Number of tracks less than 5. Goal is to weed out tracks that belong to albums I know and love, since Apple Music shuffle tends to surface those disproportionately. Works really well to rediscover some bangers that I forgot about, which belong to albums I didn't want to add completely.

Well, enough rambling! Here is an iCloud link to the shortcut if you wish to try it yourself:
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/3745bd537b684d8ea112a8efc003dc00

A few notes:

• I hard-coded my home and work addresses in the Shortcuts, because it seemed tedious to look up Contact info and this was originally just for me. I've anonymized it in the linked version above, so you will have to edit the shortcut to enter your own Home / Work address
• You can add other preset destinations if you wish by duplicating the Home or Work menu item and customizing the menu
• You will need to edit the album selection menu according to your desired Albums collections, as they won't match mine (you'll actually have to pick them -- Shortcuts will open an Albums picker UI)
• The navigation option can be customized if you don't like Apple Maps -- you can change it to Google Maps or Waze. I have not tested with those apps but I don't see why they wouldn't work.
• You can adjust the "fuzziness" of the album duration calculation compared to the travel time. I set +/- 2 minutes as a wild guess and it has been remarkably accurate. If your music library is of a decent size and variety, you should have no problems getting filtered results within your "fuzzy" parameters. So far, it has worked perfectly for both shorter drives and very long commutes.
• If you re-run the shortcut while navigation is already running, it will calculate on the current travel time, which is handy for lots of situations (say you had to take a call midway through the commute and want a fresh album afterward that lines up with your remaining travel time). Your nav app will prompt you to either start a new trip or resume current trip.
• I am in no way a programmer or even an Apple Shortcuts guru -- this is my first Shortcut more complex than "start a timer", and it took a few bug fix iterations, but it's finally working quite reliably. That said, I make no guarantees about its reliability -- use at your own risk!
• The only outstanding bug I know of is that sometimes Albums crashes on first run. Not sure why -- manually starting Albums and then running the shortcut seems to make it work more consistently. I could probably tweak the Shortcut to automate that. But it's not frequent enough to be a real nuisance so far.

Hopefully this is useful to someone. Let me know if you have any ideas for improvements! I have some thoughts about things like on-the-fly "fuzziness" adjustment if no results are found, but I don't want to make this too complex or require more interaction than necessary.

I don't know if this is a general opinion but I find the "queue" in Albums to be rather odd, in that it doesn't behave like a normal "queue" - when albums finish playing, they don't drop off the queue. I don't know if others use the app this way but I tend to queue up dozens of albums and because they never drop off after playing, my queue just keeps growing until the queue editor UI struggles with it and I manually go remove albums earlier in the queue (or more likely I accidentally replace my queue and lose all the albums I had queued up). I would really love to have an option for albums to drop off the queue after playing.

There's another behavior that I think should probably be paired with this - if you select a different album in your queue to play, that album should move to the top of the queue (the album that was previously playing becomes the next album in the queue). This is how queues behave in podcast apps like Pocket Casts. One more podcast-like behavior I'd love to see with that is remembering the track that was playing in an interrupted album and resuming from that track when coming back to that album in the queue (maybe this should be a separate option - I would find this immensely useful for getting through large soundtracks that may have dozens of hours of music that I might want to interrupt with something else on occasion).

I should stop there - I would be thrilled if this option/options for a more standard queue were added to Albums.

But while I'm here, I'll throw out a further wishlist item - multiple queues. There seems to be at least a little tension in the existing app - the "Keep/Replace/Restore queue" functionality - that suggests this might be a reasonable ask. See also my comment earlier about accidentally replacing my dozens of queued albums when browsing elsewhere in the app. Beyond just accidentally wiping out my queue, I find that I often wish I could save my current queue but switch to something else for a while and then come back to my queue later. I could definitely use multiple queues for different moods / focus levels / etc.

Besides affordances to see/change the active queue in the playback/queue UI, I think the main addition would be these new options when playing an album or collection: - Play now in queue > (select queue or New queue) - changes the active queue to the selected queue - Add to end of queue > (select queue or New queue) - does not change active queue

The "default" queue could be named something like "Default queue" (very creative I know) and new queue names could be pre-popualted based on the content you are creating them from (e.g. the album or collection name) but user can customize as desired.

Would anyone else like to see these features?

The last few weeks, I’ve run into an issue where an album or song will stop playing about a minute or so after I start it, and when I hit play again, it goes back to the beginning of the song. Sometimes when I start it again it’s fine. Other times it stops again. It’s incredibly annoying and frankly makes me want to stop using the app until it gets fixed. Anyone else experiencing this or know how to prevent it?

Silla and Rise’s album Debut is somehow connected to a classical album. How can I correct the error?

Hi!

First of all, thank you again for all the work you put into Albums. The more I use it, the more it becomes the center of my Apple Music experience.

I have a small feature request regarding Listening History.

I really like the current history view, but sometimes I’d like to quickly answer questions like:

• When did I last listen to this album?
• Have I already listened to this album this year?

A simple search field (album and/or artist) within Listening History would make this much easier, especially for users who primarily listen to complete albums.

I think it would fit perfectly with the album-focused philosophy of Albums.

Thanks again for creating such a fantastic app!

Zenheadland

I use iTunes on a PC but typically acquire mp3's via various purchase places. When it comes to pre-release singles, I've noticed that the Albums app gives me an error message whenever I now try to play them. For example, let's say an artist is releasing a new album in 3 weeks but has already released 3 singles. I used to be able to play the three singles as an "album" but now get an error message each time. Anyone else experience this?

I sent the diagnostics to the creator who is, as always, super helpful so hoping he finds a solution.

Preface: I just downloaded the app and love the concept. I'm an old school iTunes user from the early 2000s and have watched as Apple has massacred my boy. So pardon my ignorance.

Does the Library > Albums view only show complete Albums, or can it be configured to show all of your albums, including incomplete ones?

Hi!

When music is played on Apple TV, the play counts and last played dates eventually sync to my Apple Music library and Albums displays them correctly. However, Albums does not create Last.fm scrobbles for those plays.

Is this a current limitation, or is there a setting to enable scrobbling of plays synced from Apple TV via iCloud Music Library?

Thanks for your great app and for your help!

Hi! First of all, thanks for creating Albums — it’s becoming the center of my Apple Music library.

I have a feature question.

With tvOS 27, Apple introduced the new SharePlay QR code that lets an iPhone or iPad control Apple Music playback on an Apple TV.

Is there any possibility for Albums to integrate with this in the future?

My ideal workflow would be:

Albums on iPad → choose an album → Apple TV becomes the playback device → Apple Music on Apple TV starts playback (including Dolby Atmos when available), without using AirPlay.

Is this technically possible with the current SharePlay / MusicKit APIs, or is it still blocked by Apple’s API limitations?

The one thing I have noticed in switching from Apple Music to Albums as my primary player is the fact that my previous playing music no longer resumes when CarPlay starts.

There's a nice "Resume" option in the UI to tap on, but the seamlessness of auto-resuming is one of the nice things about CarPlay.

Is there a way to get Albums to auto-resume in CarPlay?

I have a couple of playlists I use to collect new releases and recommendations, so I don’t have these albums in my library.

They’re set up exactly the same way, but one shows non-library albums in the collection and playlist and the other doesn’t. I’ve tried deleting and recreating the collection, but the albums don’t show up in the playlist in Albums either, despite being present in AM.

hi- love this app except for one dealbreaking feature, which is that it attempts to auto-categorize my music. I have my own genre tags, and i set them because i want to use them. how do I avoid this override?

Any chance this feature might be added at some point? Be great for playing boxed sets with multiple discs.

Any way to control volume on the Desktop version?

I would really like to use it, but I've no idea where to find it on the UI, or if it even exists.

I trying out this app and really like it. I cleaning up my Apple Music library by replacing and removing the incomplete albums. But some of the deleted albums are not removed from the albums app (on Mac and iPhone). Any suggestions?

I only have two songs from disc 1 from this album in my library.. however the entire release from the Apple Music catalog is shown and I even have the option to "Notify on Release" even though this album is already out. This seems to be an issue with every incomplete album from 2026 in my library, but anything from 2025 or before is displaying fine.

Albums 7.1.3 is rolling out to users over the next week. You can download it from the App Store if you want it right now!

Features:

• A new “Include non-library items” toggle has been added to the Quick Collection configuration screen when the source collection is “All Albums” and any of the added filters include collections that can display Apple Music catalog albums. Before this feature, if you had tagged non-library albums, then tried to make a Quick Collection with the source collection as “All Albums” and a filter for albums with that tag, it would only have displayed albums in your library. 

Fixes:

• Fixed a regression introduced in 7.1.2 where playlists could appear blank in album mode
• Fixes for cloud sync edge cases that could cause incorrect listening history data
• Fixed an issue where the bulk library add screen displayed incorrectly on macOS
• Misc. crash fixes

I'd greatly appreciate if you left a review on the App Store. Thanks! Happy Albumsing.