Not every time, but frequently when I choose ADD TO PLAYLIST to add a song to a playlist, iTunes also immediately downloads it (or sometimes the whole album) for local play. So my Apple Music folder on my local hard drive keeps growing. Is it possible to prevent this unwanted downloading?
MacBook Pro with Retina display, macOS Sierra (10.12.3), null
It sure does, thanks!
Turns out I had Automatic Downloads enabled for Music. Since I do not remember ever enabling that, I assumed it was default Apple Music behavior.
Anyway, I disabled it and deleted all contents of my `iTunes Media` > `Apple Music` folder. I'm pretty sure this solves the problem. 🙂
Hello, RJG1999!
On Spotify, when I add a song to My Songs (which is analogous to Apple Music's Library), it only adds a reference to it. It lists that song on My Songs, or that album on My Albums, but it never downloads anything unless I specifically tell Spotify to "offline sync" a specific album, playlist, or even the entirety of My Songs.
I'd like to replicate this behavior on Apple Music. I'd like to add a song to my actual Library (not merely to a playlist), without having it downloaded. I'm on a 128GB Macbook and half it has to be dedicated to a Windows bootcamp partition, so I really can't have my whole Music Library locally downloaded — but, yet, I want to build a Library.
Can you help?
Hi StratoFabio, Apple Music works in the same way. If you click the plus sign next to a song, it will add it to your library to stream. You would then have to click the cloud download icon next to the song in your library to download it for offline use. So as long as you don't click the cloud icon then it would just stream and not take up any storage on your device.
Hope that helps.
Hi - there's an option that you can uncheck to disable that functionality in iTunes. Go to iTunes - Preferences - General tab and deselect the option "Add songs to Library when adding to playlists."
Thanks for the solution!
Add song to playlist WITHOUT downloading
