How do I play genre in new Mac Music App

Couple things you could do...

• Enable the Genre link in the sidebar by hovering over Library and then choosing Edit and selecting Genre to display. From there you can shuffle
• Create smart playlists based on genre. These would be very shuffl-able and would also be accessible via Siri.

This only solves a small part of the problem. If you know exactly what genre you have, great, but what about perusing the various genres in a library. Sometimes, a music piece is placed in a misspelled or slightly inaccurate genre. With iTunes, I'd peruse my huge library until I spotted a genre that fit my mood or the gathering I'm hosting. Sometimes I'd see a genre I'm not familiar with and find a recording that I felt wasn't accurate and modify it. I can't do any of this with this new app.

Why can't Apple just improve things rather than change for the sake of change? None off this garbage would happen if Steve Jobs were still around. I've been a longtime Apple user but it annoys me the direction they've gone the last few years. I don't think they're thinking things through and just pushing increasingly inferior products on us.

those are good options but they don't solve it entirely. unfortunately if you've got 26500 'items' (191gb) of music that you have been collecting for 15 years, it is not possible... yes it works if your genres are all 'there' (more than often they are not or are just too random) but eg when i search "mixtape riot" (a music blog) like i would have done on itunes, it is impossible for me to play all the "mixtape riot" results - the reason being in my itunes i had used 'album by artist' and entered "mixtape riot" - when apple music shows search results, there's no 'album by artist' so i'm totally stuck. it really is not good. the whole search feature is rubbish - just keep it like itunes had it for 15 / 20 years!!

spot on! that opens up a search bar that acts like the old itunes search. basically finds anything in your library just using the word ie "piano" "jazz" or "mixtape riot"!! haha well done i'm so relieved. thanks mate

Wow -- excellent, thanks so much.

"Genres" are how I organize my entire iTunes library and this gets it all back for me -- with the same exact view I was used to in iTunes.

Maybe in future releases Apple can enable Genres by default or maybe always show the "edit" function without having to hover over it.

Thanks again.

Hey turingtest2, your suggestion is what solved my biggest gripe with Apple's new 'Music' app! Thank you for taking the time to post here. I couldn't figure out how to effectively search (or "filter" as "Music" calls it) my music library! It is incredibly annoying that there isn't an option to make this filter field persistent, this is one of the biggest changes I believe Apple needs to make to the Music app to make it more user-friendly.

Option 1 worked for me. Why can't Apple provide this kind of info with its software releases? A downloadable PDF of feature changes can't be that hard to provide. I guess I'll have to get the next David Pogue Missing Manual.

EXACTLY!!! How is this even possible that the Apple developers didn't think this through. When I go to a Barnes & Noble bookstore (for example), I may not know what I'm looking for other than something intriguing to read. Then I think, "okay, perhaps something in a mystery novel", so I go to that section. Then I say, "oh yeah, I like such and such author", so I look for those books. Then finally I'll find a book that sounds good. This is essentially what the 3-column browser was enabling us to do. I'm blown away at some of the absurd things Apple is doing as of late., and I can't believe they took this BASIC feature away from the new Apple Music app. For now… I'm gonna stick with Spotify for all my music listening. Isn't that sad, Apple? You are forcing many of us to do precisely the opposite of what you had hoped for. Pathetic!

Steve Jobs would be appalled!

totally agree, Apple seem to have dropped the ability to select genre, artist & see all albums by that artist in an easy to read column. Have always been a fan of iTunes layout but Music makes navigating on a Mac a nightmare. Hopefully this will be solved with an update

I fumbled through the software for nearly an hour before locating the "Filter Field" option. I was happy when I found it, but immediately noticed that the "Filter Field" wouldn't stay permanently as I had to repeatedly go and select it again and again in order to open it and perform individual song searches. I really miss iTunes!

Apple, please help make this right and make the "Filter Field" a permanent option! It would help tremendously and would definitely make it more user friendly for those who have 35, 000+ songs in their library and have used iTunes since its inception. Thanks in advance for your support.

Completely agree this is irritating at best. Apple keeps trying to make things stupider and stupider in my opinion, and taking away good utilities. Just like the stupid stuff they have done with Apple mail in Catalina. Geez, Apple, cut it out!

Column Browser seemed to disappear but when I select "Songs" in the "Library" side bar then "View" on top bar...its back. The difference to pre-IOS update seems to be that the Album artwork / cover won't display.

Try View > Show Filter Field. Annoyingly it isn't persistent.

tt2

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tt2

There is no need to create Smart Playlist to mix up a genre. Just click on the mix button in the toolbar. You can use the Up Next list on the right to see that the songs are indeed mixed up.