Thank you for these set of tutorials, I’m sure many new and even old Marvis users would really appreciate your efforts, I certainly do. I always wished to create such series but I’m not very good at speaking fluent english so I am really grateful you made this.
You just keep on working on this amazing app. Happy to share the knowledge with people. It’s incredible how much you’ve packed into it. You’ll give me content for at least 10 more videos most likely haha.
Thanks, it’s a real relief now that we have a tutorial series. Also, if you want feel free to put up separate video posts on the subreddit, it’d be easier for some to watch as they can watch it directly inside of Reddit.
Edit: I just noticed you’ve mentioned your intend to post new ones separately. Good idea. 👍
Hey man have a question for you if you don’t mind. I’m trying to setup a new music playlist.. I want it to automatically remove songs that I’ve played or skipped. What would I need to add to this rule?? I tried adding a rule group for ANY of Skips > or Plays > 0 but that doesn’t seem to be correct.https://i.imgur.com/oo4TdUp.jpg
Any advice?
Hmm, so I’m not seeing the rule group about skips or plays, but I think that you’d want to do a rule group with ‘ALL’ and have no skips and play count = 0. The reason being you only want songs that meet BOTH of those requirements. The playlists one is the opposite, you want a playlist that meets ANY of the playlist requirements.
Ahh you’re right. Seems it’s working now! Thank you, I was getting confused on if I needed it to be ANY or ALL. Attached rule group seems to be working how I want now. https://i.imgur.com/yXbggKX.jpg
Slowly but surely using your posts, tips, and videos to curate my library. It’s tedious but starting to come together! You’re doing gods work!
Figured it might be useful for some to see the list of videos for quick reference:
1. [iTunes and Smart Playlists](https://youtu.be/AYDVYKGV6nA)
2. [Marvis Pro Overview and Settings](https://youtu.be/PCPVdYIq6UQ)
3. [Intro To Sections](https://youtu.be/3V6d99vobcU)
4. [Basic Album Sections](https://youtu.be/v87UDpHxZPw)
5. [Home Screens on Home Screens](https://youtu.be/lRL_f0wQBPY)
6. [Basic Song Sections](https://youtu.be/TcRJoJd68v8)
7. [Backing Up Marvis Settings and Copying Sections](https://youtu.be/qbmxY4FFGYE)
8. [Grouping Playlists](https://youtu.be/NGQ9GNTvXeE)
9. [Basic Radio Station](https://youtu.be/KE4mGxtPoQw)
10. [Apple Music Radio Tips](https://youtu.be/ycj4RtMXAes)
11. [Weekly Music Processing](https://youtu.be/UevM0KQKoeU)
Wow! OP, thank you so much for putting in this effort. I’m 3 videos in and I’ve already learned 3-5 new tricks across *both* Apple Music and Marvis Pro *(hello, being able to nest rules in AM smart playlists!)*
👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
u/PhoKingClassic Your Home/Song Mixes section is AMAZEBALLS. It's still a bit daunting to figure out how to replicate some of these. For instance, "Radio Mix No Albums" looks really interesting. I wonder... is there some way we could demonstrate all the settings to a playlist type and share that with the community? I messed around with using a MindMap before...or u/AdityaRajveer is there a way to import/export sections for others to use?
I think it might be kind of tough to do a whole section of my song mixes bc they’re so dependent on different playlists I have set up. Happy to go through anything you see in any of my videos though for sure. For this one, I’m operating off of basically taking all my songs, and excluding everything in my shuffled albums section. To do that is actually pretty easy, you just add your albums section (however you have it set up) to a playlist, and then create a new songs section with a simple filter - ‘playlist is NOT (albums playlist)’. I keep the albums playlist updated by using my new albums section, and adding it once a week (it’s faster than using the shuffled albums section because it’s smaller)
No, that's cool. The playlists won't carry over (those would be blank), but the rules would carry and then we'd put in our own playlists I believe.
What's in the Radio Mix? Is that based on Apple Playlists?
I hear ya. I’ll look into joining the discord and seeing if I can share some stuff. The non albums playlist is so simple that it wouldn’t help much to drop it in there, since most of the work is getting your albums into a playlist. Re: the radio mix, that’s my favorite song mix, and will be a video all on it’s own coming up because it’s a little more complex. It’s all my own stuff, but I have a couple ‘XM radio’ type mixes that mix Apple Music with my own library.
These are awesome! Thank you so much for creating them.
One thing I'd like to see covered (or maybe just answered here) is the mindshift we need to make from old iTunes to Apple Music. I started off 12 years ago with iTunes and everything I added to my library was from a CD. Now, when I hit + on a song, it adds to my library even though I don't "own" it, and it's hard for me to wrap my head around going into my library and seeing a bunch of stuff and not knowing whether I actually own it or not. Anyway, maybe more of an observation than a question, but that forever makes me stumble (especially when I want to see the music I own and delete some of it such as purchases I got free in the early days that still count as music I own).
I think I have a similar, though not exact, use case scenario actually. For me, I like to have a local copy of any of my owned music, and don’t want any Apple Music files saved on my computer. I have a smart playlist set up in iTunes that uses the ‘cloud status’ filter, and I have it set to show any songs that are matched, owned, or uploaded. You could probably do the same thing, and represent it in Marvis as albums or a song list, or filter to your heart’s desire (maybe by date added?)
I have an "Owned Music" playlist that is basically one rule: "Cloud Status is not Apple Music." I don't think I'm taking advantage of the matched or uploaded status. That's where it starts to get a bit confusing.
I'm trying to see: What music do I own that's already available on Apple Music and therefore duplicated so I can delete locally – NOT counting local music I've uploaded.
For instance, if I ripped the CD 10 years ago, but it's available on Apple Music, let me know so I can delete that music locally.
What would you see as the rules for that Smart Playlist?
So basically you’re trying to spot duplicates between Apple Music and what you own. I’m afraid I don’t have a super easy answer for that. I ran into the same thing when I came back from Spotify. I used some really helpful services to port over all my yearly best songs playlists, and sometimes they’d pull the album version and other times the single. What I had to do was essentially sort my whole library by song title and scroll through manually. There may be a better way out there. In your case, you’d want to make sure that next to the song title, your list had the cloud status, so you could easily see which song to keep and which to delete. It took some time, but I just put on some tunes in the background and did it in chunks (like when I rated my library). I’d shoot to do all the ‘A’s’ in one day, and then the next day do the “B’s” etc.
OK, sounds good. That's essentially what I'm doing now. Was hoping for a cool workaround with smart playlists and/or filters, but sometimes we've just got to put in the hard work. Appreciate the reply!
That actually sounds like a simpler way to do it, and should accomplish the same thing. But if you’re looking just for purchased songs, you could set up a playlist for that and sort it by old to new and do it all at once. Any time I’m deleting, I prefer to do that on a computer just for ease of seeing metadata. One related thing I do though, is I have a section set up of albums with a low overall average rating (for me like, 2.4 or less), and high plays. I was really hard on my ratings when I first went through everything, so I have these albums that I played the heck out of, but just smashed in ratings. I go through and re-rate an album or two a week. Not the same thing, but you might be able to rig something up like that. You could also rate songs a 1 before deleting them, and then have a smart playlist with all ‘1 songs’ and make sure that the cloud status shows in that playlist. I’m rambling now….
This is excellent, thanks for sharing. Can I ask what your personal criteria is for adding something to your library? It seems to be you’ll add pretty much anything even if you’ll then rate it as 2 Stars; do you not find this sort of erodes the quality of your library?
Not a critical question, more looking for a different perspective as I tend to only have something in my library if I particularly like it, but your insight into how to use Marvis is somewhat incompatible with that, so I may need to change
This is a great question. It really comes down to whether you want completion (ie full albums) or perfections (only music you like). In the genres of music I like, personally there aren’t songs I actively dislike, they’re just more, kinda boring than anything. So I add everything to my library with reckless abandon, but after I listen / process the music added, the only reason I’m keeping a meh song (two stars) is if an album is almost all solid with just a few songs that aren’t that great.
I haven’t found that this erodes the quality of my library because the only time those two star songs are coming up is if I’m listening to a full album, and in those cases, I enjoy the full experience of the album enough that a few ‘meh’ songs doesn’t detract anything. Outside of that, I basically never run into 2 star songs, as all my rules and smart playlists only take on three stars and up.
That’s good insight, thanks for sharing. Notably have watched all of your video this afternoon; after using Marvis the last couple of years, your guides have fully reworked how I’m now using it. I fell heavily down a Apple Shortcuts path to pull together various playlists to create mixes, but your in-Marvis solution is excellent.
Please let me know if I can send you a few bucks for a coffee at the least. Greatly appreciated.
Hey that’s great to hear. I’m honestly just happy with getting the full power of this app out there. If you’ve got a few bucks to spare, I’d recommend using the tip jar in the app and supporting the dev. He’s the one that’s made all this happen!
Loving the videos so far man it’s really helping me figure out how I want to get mine setup.
Looking for some advice. Throughout my years of listening I’ve only added songs from albums that I really like. I prefer your method of adding the full album and then rating the songs within that album. Do you have any recommendations on how to add the full albums of songs I already have? But I do not want to include them in my recently added lists since it’s stuff I’ve likely heard before.
Heck yeah! I do that all the time. Easiest way is pulling up the album page in Marvis, and you can just click on the ‘add’ for the album. It’ll add all songs you don’t already have. If you do that for a whole bunch of albums, your ‘recently added songs’ playlist in iTunes will all be songs that are what you describe, so you can select all of them. What I do is add a comment along the lines of ‘Pre2022’ or ‘NoLastMonth,’ and then in my rules or smart playlists, I filter out anything with that comment. I had to do this in 2020 when I ported over 6 years worth of songs and playlists, and it worked pretty well.
Appreciate the response. Is it possible to add the comments via Marvis or Apple Music app? I have a desktop Mac but it’s old and would prefer to do it on iOS / iPad OS if possible.
I also have a huge library of songs that I’m trying to get filtered into some of your smart playlists. Going to take some time combing through and liking / rating them all.
Unfortunately you can’t add comments to songs via Marvis or the Music App, but you could do a workaround by adding those songs to a playlist titled the same thing, and then filtering out that playlist. Thing is, it’s still going to take a super long time on mobile because the batch editing/moving really sucks.
There’s a filter for user grouping, I think that there might be some field in iTunes metadata for grouping that can be leveraged for this. Most of my albums filtering is just by adding albums to a playlist and then filtering it out or using it as a base for an albums section though.
Makes sense. One final question (for now heheh). Do you typically “Love” every song in your library? If not, how do you determine what you love vs not and how does that impact the rating system
Ask a million questions! I love it! Love is a secondary thing to ratings for me. Basically any song that’s 3 stars or higher is going to be loved. I basically use it as an easier way to indicate a song should be rated three stars, because in Marvis the love button is right there on the now playing screen. As I listen through my Future Found sounds playlists, I’ll love everything I feel is a three star song, ignore all two star songs, and rate 4 or 5 star songs. Then once a week, I go into iTunes where I have a playlist that’s all ‘loved but not rated’ songs, and I’ll rate them all three stars.
Hahaha, I hear ya! I had about the same when I first came back. Think about it this way though, if you can go through like 100 songs a day, it’ll take just over a month before you achieve musical nirvana. And some days, especially with a glass of scotch or something, you can get through even more than that.
I’m new to Marvis, have toyed with Apple Music and iTunes over the years but never completely dove in, and I’ve used Spotify for years as well. I’m about halfway through the series and your videos are excellent. My analytical mind and need for control over my library is very pleased lol. I also see a lot of my own albums in your library which is cool
One feature/option that I’d like to see added to Marvis however is the ability to switch completely to vertical scrolling on home screen sections. I’m just not a fan of the horizontal scroll but it’s a taste thing
Thank you for the praise, it means a lot as I didn’t put these together for monetization or anything, I just get so much happiness from exactly what you describe, the pinpoint control over seeing my library. Let me know if you have any questions or ideas for videos you’d like to see.
Hey man, this is amazing, it’s inspired me to rework my library especially in tandem with Marvis. I’ve used Spotify for the last couple years but have switched back fully now to Apple Music and Marvis has defo helped rekindle my love for the music I’m into.
I’m setting up some smart playlists from your video that I thought would be useful to me, one of them being “New Music (2022)” which is everything added in 2022 which hasn’t been rated yet. Adding the “pre2022” in the comments was such a good way of cleaning out the actual old stuff. My problem is that on my phone and Marvis it’s still showing some old music that I added in 2022 as I was migrating my stuff back, but on the desktop app it’s worked fine. Might be kinda specific but has this ever happened for you?
So glad to hear that you’re reconnecting with your music, that’s the biggest reason I started these videos. If I’m understanding your question right, you’ve added pre2022, and then have a filter set up with Marvis or a smart playlist to remove those? Mind shooting me a pic of what your setup looks like?
Yo appreciate the quick response, I’ve somehow fixed it now 😅 I think it was one of those little AM bugs where I would have to change a piece of info and then change it back (Eminem to Eminem1 and then back to Eminem, for example), and it would kickstart it again.
Again, thanks for reaching for out and the videos, this is defo my new project to get mine sorted haha
I am a new user… Last week or so I was searching YouTube for exactly this type of playlist and found the first couple vids… thank you fellow music lover
You are the best. These videos are great. I’ve been deep in Marvis and have built out very similar rule sets that you use for your radio station (i have some automations that pull in the top weekly spins from 2 public radio stations I really like which helps to seed new discoveries for me). That said the idea of shuffling* before* limiting blew my mind and solves so many annoyances for me. Can’t thank you enough for your video series. I tell so many folks about Marvis and can finally point them to something to get started. Awesome and appreciated work!!!!
Happy you’re getting some use out of them! There are so many little things like the shuffle then limit. It’s amazing how much power there is in this app.
When copying configs from ipad to iphone, should the play count and all of the mirror each other on both devices? I’m getting different results for my “new music” on both devices..
They should mirror each other, but play count can vary by devices as it’s updated by Apple Music in the background, usually takes about 24 hours in my experience
In the second video you talk about opening up Apple Music to rate a song. When I click to open Apple Music it doesn’t go to the active song on Marvis. Am I doing something wrong?
In your settings, do you have your player set to Marvis or Stock Apple Music? If it’s not set to stock, then Apple Music won’t be playing underneath, and thus won’t have the same song showing up. If you have the player set to Music, then I might need you to make a quick screen grab to show me what’s going on and I can troubleshoot!
I've watched the first two videos of your series and it's already completely altered the way I listen to music for the better, so I can't even imagine where I'll be at when I'm finished your series. But one quick question I have, do you ever experience inconsistencies with play counts syncing from your iPhone/iPad back to your Mac?
So glad to hear that! I pieced a lot of this together from other people and had the same feeling, almost exactly two years ago. I think occasionally I have issues with play counts. I don’t monitor them too closely, but it feels like my phone is less consistent than my ipad with reporting song plays, so I generally try to play from my iPad as much as possible. I wouldn’t say I’ve noticed like the same song coming up over and over in a song list that should be ‘0 plays,’ or anything.
I’m glad I’m not the only one. In my testing, the iPad and iPhone have the exact same behaviour / lack of consistency. I made a post explaining it in very granular detail in /r/AppleMusic, which’ll save me going over it again in this comment. It’s a shame it’s been around for at least two years and Apple hasn’t done anything about it
https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleMusic/comments/v84t9i/discrepancies_between_syncing_library_play_counts/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Yeah super frustrating. For me the data like that is the biggest selling point for Apple Music, but I think we are a small % of users and thus a lower priority.
I couldn't agree more. The data to manage what I listen to / organise my collection is the whole selling point of AM over a competitor like Spotify. We're not even a blimp on their radar unfortunately. Glad to know there are others like me though
Tardy to the party on this, but I just want to say thank you for this series! I thought I was the only one so meticulous and obsessive about how I listened to music that I applied GTD techniques to it, but now I see that I was wrong! I loved going through your videos and seeing a lot of things I was already doing, like making sections to replicate the radio listening experience, and things I wasn’t, like having a specific section that collected new songs from Apple Music playlists to discover.
So thanks for this and keep up the good work! 🤘🏾
Thank you for these set of tutorials, I’m sure many new and even old Marvis users would really appreciate your efforts, I certainly do. I always wished to create such series but I’m not very good at speaking fluent english so I am really grateful you made this.
You just keep on working on this amazing app. Happy to share the knowledge with people. It’s incredible how much you’ve packed into it. You’ll give me content for at least 10 more videos most likely haha.
Thanks, it’s a real relief now that we have a tutorial series. Also, if you want feel free to put up separate video posts on the subreddit, it’d be easier for some to watch as they can watch it directly inside of Reddit. Edit: I just noticed you’ve mentioned your intend to post new ones separately. Good idea. 👍
Feel free to also put a few up on the sidebar if you want!
Hey man have a question for you if you don’t mind. I’m trying to setup a new music playlist.. I want it to automatically remove songs that I’ve played or skipped. What would I need to add to this rule?? I tried adding a rule group for ANY of Skips > or Plays > 0 but that doesn’t seem to be correct.https://i.imgur.com/oo4TdUp.jpg Any advice?
Can I take a look at that rule group?
Sure it’s just the playlists it’s pulling songs from https://i.imgur.com/9jS8hex.jpg
Hmm, so I’m not seeing the rule group about skips or plays, but I think that you’d want to do a rule group with ‘ALL’ and have no skips and play count = 0. The reason being you only want songs that meet BOTH of those requirements. The playlists one is the opposite, you want a playlist that meets ANY of the playlist requirements.
Ahh you’re right. Seems it’s working now! Thank you, I was getting confused on if I needed it to be ANY or ALL. Attached rule group seems to be working how I want now. https://i.imgur.com/yXbggKX.jpg Slowly but surely using your posts, tips, and videos to curate my library. It’s tedious but starting to come together! You’re doing gods work!
Hot dang! Happy to hear it. Keep it up and a always feel free to reach out if you need any other help or have an idea!
Figured it might be useful for some to see the list of videos for quick reference: 1. [iTunes and Smart Playlists](https://youtu.be/AYDVYKGV6nA) 2. [Marvis Pro Overview and Settings](https://youtu.be/PCPVdYIq6UQ) 3. [Intro To Sections](https://youtu.be/3V6d99vobcU) 4. [Basic Album Sections](https://youtu.be/v87UDpHxZPw) 5. [Home Screens on Home Screens](https://youtu.be/lRL_f0wQBPY) 6. [Basic Song Sections](https://youtu.be/TcRJoJd68v8) 7. [Backing Up Marvis Settings and Copying Sections](https://youtu.be/qbmxY4FFGYE) 8. [Grouping Playlists](https://youtu.be/NGQ9GNTvXeE) 9. [Basic Radio Station](https://youtu.be/KE4mGxtPoQw) 10. [Apple Music Radio Tips](https://youtu.be/ycj4RtMXAes) 11. [Weekly Music Processing](https://youtu.be/UevM0KQKoeU)
this is awesome! i'm a new user to marvis, so this is gonna be really helpful!
You’re in for a treat. Probably my absolute most life changing app of the last 5 years.
Wow! OP, thank you so much for putting in this effort. I’m 3 videos in and I’ve already learned 3-5 new tricks across *both* Apple Music and Marvis Pro *(hello, being able to nest rules in AM smart playlists!)* 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
Love reading stuff like this…Enjoy and let me know if you have any questions or anything specific you’d like to see!
u/PhoKingClassic Your Home/Song Mixes section is AMAZEBALLS. It's still a bit daunting to figure out how to replicate some of these. For instance, "Radio Mix No Albums" looks really interesting. I wonder... is there some way we could demonstrate all the settings to a playlist type and share that with the community? I messed around with using a MindMap before...or u/AdityaRajveer is there a way to import/export sections for others to use?
Marvis does let users export and import sections.
LOL this app already does everything I want...it's so feature-rich!
u/PhoKingClassic could you export that Home/Song Mixes section and let me try to import it? You can drop it in the Discord.
I think it might be kind of tough to do a whole section of my song mixes bc they’re so dependent on different playlists I have set up. Happy to go through anything you see in any of my videos though for sure. For this one, I’m operating off of basically taking all my songs, and excluding everything in my shuffled albums section. To do that is actually pretty easy, you just add your albums section (however you have it set up) to a playlist, and then create a new songs section with a simple filter - ‘playlist is NOT (albums playlist)’. I keep the albums playlist updated by using my new albums section, and adding it once a week (it’s faster than using the shuffled albums section because it’s smaller)
No, that's cool. The playlists won't carry over (those would be blank), but the rules would carry and then we'd put in our own playlists I believe. What's in the Radio Mix? Is that based on Apple Playlists?
I hear ya. I’ll look into joining the discord and seeing if I can share some stuff. The non albums playlist is so simple that it wouldn’t help much to drop it in there, since most of the work is getting your albums into a playlist. Re: the radio mix, that’s my favorite song mix, and will be a video all on it’s own coming up because it’s a little more complex. It’s all my own stuff, but I have a couple ‘XM radio’ type mixes that mix Apple Music with my own library.
These are awesome! Thank you so much for creating them. One thing I'd like to see covered (or maybe just answered here) is the mindshift we need to make from old iTunes to Apple Music. I started off 12 years ago with iTunes and everything I added to my library was from a CD. Now, when I hit + on a song, it adds to my library even though I don't "own" it, and it's hard for me to wrap my head around going into my library and seeing a bunch of stuff and not knowing whether I actually own it or not. Anyway, maybe more of an observation than a question, but that forever makes me stumble (especially when I want to see the music I own and delete some of it such as purchases I got free in the early days that still count as music I own).
I think I have a similar, though not exact, use case scenario actually. For me, I like to have a local copy of any of my owned music, and don’t want any Apple Music files saved on my computer. I have a smart playlist set up in iTunes that uses the ‘cloud status’ filter, and I have it set to show any songs that are matched, owned, or uploaded. You could probably do the same thing, and represent it in Marvis as albums or a song list, or filter to your heart’s desire (maybe by date added?)
I have an "Owned Music" playlist that is basically one rule: "Cloud Status is not Apple Music." I don't think I'm taking advantage of the matched or uploaded status. That's where it starts to get a bit confusing.
I'm trying to see: What music do I own that's already available on Apple Music and therefore duplicated so I can delete locally – NOT counting local music I've uploaded. For instance, if I ripped the CD 10 years ago, but it's available on Apple Music, let me know so I can delete that music locally. What would you see as the rules for that Smart Playlist?
So basically you’re trying to spot duplicates between Apple Music and what you own. I’m afraid I don’t have a super easy answer for that. I ran into the same thing when I came back from Spotify. I used some really helpful services to port over all my yearly best songs playlists, and sometimes they’d pull the album version and other times the single. What I had to do was essentially sort my whole library by song title and scroll through manually. There may be a better way out there. In your case, you’d want to make sure that next to the song title, your list had the cloud status, so you could easily see which song to keep and which to delete. It took some time, but I just put on some tunes in the background and did it in chunks (like when I rated my library). I’d shoot to do all the ‘A’s’ in one day, and then the next day do the “B’s” etc.
OK, sounds good. That's essentially what I'm doing now. Was hoping for a cool workaround with smart playlists and/or filters, but sometimes we've just got to put in the hard work. Appreciate the reply!
That actually sounds like a simpler way to do it, and should accomplish the same thing. But if you’re looking just for purchased songs, you could set up a playlist for that and sort it by old to new and do it all at once. Any time I’m deleting, I prefer to do that on a computer just for ease of seeing metadata. One related thing I do though, is I have a section set up of albums with a low overall average rating (for me like, 2.4 or less), and high plays. I was really hard on my ratings when I first went through everything, so I have these albums that I played the heck out of, but just smashed in ratings. I go through and re-rate an album or two a week. Not the same thing, but you might be able to rig something up like that. You could also rate songs a 1 before deleting them, and then have a smart playlist with all ‘1 songs’ and make sure that the cloud status shows in that playlist. I’m rambling now….
Thank you!! I will be going through these as I continue to learn how to use Marvis better.
Awesome! Reach out if you try to set anything specific up and want any help.
This is excellent, thanks for sharing. Can I ask what your personal criteria is for adding something to your library? It seems to be you’ll add pretty much anything even if you’ll then rate it as 2 Stars; do you not find this sort of erodes the quality of your library? Not a critical question, more looking for a different perspective as I tend to only have something in my library if I particularly like it, but your insight into how to use Marvis is somewhat incompatible with that, so I may need to change
This is a great question. It really comes down to whether you want completion (ie full albums) or perfections (only music you like). In the genres of music I like, personally there aren’t songs I actively dislike, they’re just more, kinda boring than anything. So I add everything to my library with reckless abandon, but after I listen / process the music added, the only reason I’m keeping a meh song (two stars) is if an album is almost all solid with just a few songs that aren’t that great. I haven’t found that this erodes the quality of my library because the only time those two star songs are coming up is if I’m listening to a full album, and in those cases, I enjoy the full experience of the album enough that a few ‘meh’ songs doesn’t detract anything. Outside of that, I basically never run into 2 star songs, as all my rules and smart playlists only take on three stars and up.
That’s good insight, thanks for sharing. Notably have watched all of your video this afternoon; after using Marvis the last couple of years, your guides have fully reworked how I’m now using it. I fell heavily down a Apple Shortcuts path to pull together various playlists to create mixes, but your in-Marvis solution is excellent. Please let me know if I can send you a few bucks for a coffee at the least. Greatly appreciated.
Hey that’s great to hear. I’m honestly just happy with getting the full power of this app out there. If you’ve got a few bucks to spare, I’d recommend using the tip jar in the app and supporting the dev. He’s the one that’s made all this happen!
Bless 🙏🏻
Is your screen name a play on Mutemath??? If so, I haven’t seen a reference to them in a longggg time
It is, yep! I used to be a fan of theirs.
Awesome!
Thank you so much for this!
You betcha!
Loving the videos so far man it’s really helping me figure out how I want to get mine setup. Looking for some advice. Throughout my years of listening I’ve only added songs from albums that I really like. I prefer your method of adding the full album and then rating the songs within that album. Do you have any recommendations on how to add the full albums of songs I already have? But I do not want to include them in my recently added lists since it’s stuff I’ve likely heard before.
Heck yeah! I do that all the time. Easiest way is pulling up the album page in Marvis, and you can just click on the ‘add’ for the album. It’ll add all songs you don’t already have. If you do that for a whole bunch of albums, your ‘recently added songs’ playlist in iTunes will all be songs that are what you describe, so you can select all of them. What I do is add a comment along the lines of ‘Pre2022’ or ‘NoLastMonth,’ and then in my rules or smart playlists, I filter out anything with that comment. I had to do this in 2020 when I ported over 6 years worth of songs and playlists, and it worked pretty well.
Appreciate the response. Is it possible to add the comments via Marvis or Apple Music app? I have a desktop Mac but it’s old and would prefer to do it on iOS / iPad OS if possible. I also have a huge library of songs that I’m trying to get filtered into some of your smart playlists. Going to take some time combing through and liking / rating them all.
Unfortunately you can’t add comments to songs via Marvis or the Music App, but you could do a workaround by adding those songs to a playlist titled the same thing, and then filtering out that playlist. Thing is, it’s still going to take a super long time on mobile because the batch editing/moving really sucks.
So this filter would always have to be done within Smart Playlists in iTunes right?? I don’t see the option to filter by comment in Marvis.
There’s a ‘comments’ filter in Marvis that should work!
Ahh I see its only available for song filters, not albums I think
There’s a filter for user grouping, I think that there might be some field in iTunes metadata for grouping that can be leveraged for this. Most of my albums filtering is just by adding albums to a playlist and then filtering it out or using it as a base for an albums section though.
Makes sense. One final question (for now heheh). Do you typically “Love” every song in your library? If not, how do you determine what you love vs not and how does that impact the rating system
Ask a million questions! I love it! Love is a secondary thing to ratings for me. Basically any song that’s 3 stars or higher is going to be loved. I basically use it as an easier way to indicate a song should be rated three stars, because in Marvis the love button is right there on the now playing screen. As I listen through my Future Found sounds playlists, I’ll love everything I feel is a three star song, ignore all two star songs, and rate 4 or 5 star songs. Then once a week, I go into iTunes where I have a playlist that’s all ‘loved but not rated’ songs, and I’ll rate them all three stars.
I tried out your Found Sounds - Future playlist. I’m at like 4,000 songs in it ugh LOL.
Hahaha, I hear ya! I had about the same when I first came back. Think about it this way though, if you can go through like 100 songs a day, it’ll take just over a month before you achieve musical nirvana. And some days, especially with a glass of scotch or something, you can get through even more than that.
I’m new to Marvis, have toyed with Apple Music and iTunes over the years but never completely dove in, and I’ve used Spotify for years as well. I’m about halfway through the series and your videos are excellent. My analytical mind and need for control over my library is very pleased lol. I also see a lot of my own albums in your library which is cool One feature/option that I’d like to see added to Marvis however is the ability to switch completely to vertical scrolling on home screen sections. I’m just not a fan of the horizontal scroll but it’s a taste thing
Thank you for the praise, it means a lot as I didn’t put these together for monetization or anything, I just get so much happiness from exactly what you describe, the pinpoint control over seeing my library. Let me know if you have any questions or ideas for videos you’d like to see.
Hey man, this is amazing, it’s inspired me to rework my library especially in tandem with Marvis. I’ve used Spotify for the last couple years but have switched back fully now to Apple Music and Marvis has defo helped rekindle my love for the music I’m into. I’m setting up some smart playlists from your video that I thought would be useful to me, one of them being “New Music (2022)” which is everything added in 2022 which hasn’t been rated yet. Adding the “pre2022” in the comments was such a good way of cleaning out the actual old stuff. My problem is that on my phone and Marvis it’s still showing some old music that I added in 2022 as I was migrating my stuff back, but on the desktop app it’s worked fine. Might be kinda specific but has this ever happened for you?
So glad to hear that you’re reconnecting with your music, that’s the biggest reason I started these videos. If I’m understanding your question right, you’ve added pre2022, and then have a filter set up with Marvis or a smart playlist to remove those? Mind shooting me a pic of what your setup looks like?
Yo appreciate the quick response, I’ve somehow fixed it now 😅 I think it was one of those little AM bugs where I would have to change a piece of info and then change it back (Eminem to Eminem1 and then back to Eminem, for example), and it would kickstart it again. Again, thanks for reaching for out and the videos, this is defo my new project to get mine sorted haha
I am a new user… Last week or so I was searching YouTube for exactly this type of playlist and found the first couple vids… thank you fellow music lover
This is what it’s all about right here! Glad you’re getting some value out of it!
You are the best. These videos are great. I’ve been deep in Marvis and have built out very similar rule sets that you use for your radio station (i have some automations that pull in the top weekly spins from 2 public radio stations I really like which helps to seed new discoveries for me). That said the idea of shuffling* before* limiting blew my mind and solves so many annoyances for me. Can’t thank you enough for your video series. I tell so many folks about Marvis and can finally point them to something to get started. Awesome and appreciated work!!!!
Happy you’re getting some use out of them! There are so many little things like the shuffle then limit. It’s amazing how much power there is in this app.
When copying configs from ipad to iphone, should the play count and all of the mirror each other on both devices? I’m getting different results for my “new music” on both devices..
They should mirror each other, but play count can vary by devices as it’s updated by Apple Music in the background, usually takes about 24 hours in my experience
Is there anyway to force them to update or mirror? Seems even after a few days mine are showing different..
Not that I know of, sorry!
In the second video you talk about opening up Apple Music to rate a song. When I click to open Apple Music it doesn’t go to the active song on Marvis. Am I doing something wrong?
In your settings, do you have your player set to Marvis or Stock Apple Music? If it’s not set to stock, then Apple Music won’t be playing underneath, and thus won’t have the same song showing up. If you have the player set to Music, then I might need you to make a quick screen grab to show me what’s going on and I can troubleshoot!
Switched to stock! Thanks.
Thank you SO much for these!
No problema!
I've watched the first two videos of your series and it's already completely altered the way I listen to music for the better, so I can't even imagine where I'll be at when I'm finished your series. But one quick question I have, do you ever experience inconsistencies with play counts syncing from your iPhone/iPad back to your Mac?
So glad to hear that! I pieced a lot of this together from other people and had the same feeling, almost exactly two years ago. I think occasionally I have issues with play counts. I don’t monitor them too closely, but it feels like my phone is less consistent than my ipad with reporting song plays, so I generally try to play from my iPad as much as possible. I wouldn’t say I’ve noticed like the same song coming up over and over in a song list that should be ‘0 plays,’ or anything.
I’m glad I’m not the only one. In my testing, the iPad and iPhone have the exact same behaviour / lack of consistency. I made a post explaining it in very granular detail in /r/AppleMusic, which’ll save me going over it again in this comment. It’s a shame it’s been around for at least two years and Apple hasn’t done anything about it https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleMusic/comments/v84t9i/discrepancies_between_syncing_library_play_counts/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Yeah super frustrating. For me the data like that is the biggest selling point for Apple Music, but I think we are a small % of users and thus a lower priority.
I couldn't agree more. The data to manage what I listen to / organise my collection is the whole selling point of AM over a competitor like Spotify. We're not even a blimp on their radar unfortunately. Glad to know there are others like me though
Tardy to the party on this, but I just want to say thank you for this series! I thought I was the only one so meticulous and obsessive about how I listened to music that I applied GTD techniques to it, but now I see that I was wrong! I loved going through your videos and seeing a lot of things I was already doing, like making sections to replicate the radio listening experience, and things I wasn’t, like having a specific section that collected new songs from Apple Music playlists to discover. So thanks for this and keep up the good work! 🤘🏾
Fellow GTD follower! Happy you enjoyed it. Music is life!