Best way to collect my Christmas CD collection in Apple Music

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Best way to collect my Christmas CD collection in Apple Music

I have too many CDs, especially since they are becoming passé, but I love my choices from the '80's and '90's. I have 85 Christmas CDs that I would like to "collect" in Apple Music, IF they exist in Apple Music. What is the best way to register/collect my CDs? I DO NOT want to sort and select individual songs!!! I just want the albums. It appears that I can: Create a "Christmas" Playlist -> Search for CD/album in Apple Music -> Find the album -> drag album into Apple Music Albums -> drag the album into the new "Christmas" playlist -> then move on to the next CD/album in my too large collection. Does anyone have any other suggestions to digitize my CD plastic/hardware? Thank you very much, Mike

[Re-Titled By Moderator]

iPad Pro, iPadOS 18

Posted on Dec 19, 2024 8:22 PM

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Answer 1

Dec 22, 2024 8:48 PM in response to glasmann

It sounds like what you are talking about is creating playlists of Apple Music subscription songs that "match" the contents of the Christmas albums that you already own on CD. An advantage of this is that finding an album and adding it to a playlist probably takes a lot less time than importing your own CDs to your Music Library. However, you will only have access to those subscription playlists and songs for as long as you maintain the subscription … and you can only play them on Apple devices (or with Apple-supplied apps for non-Apple devices).

Another approach is to import music from your own CDs into your library, with the help of an optical drive, such as this one that I use.

Other World Computing – 24X OWC Mercury Pro USB 3.2 (5Gb/s) Super-Multi DVD/CD Burner/Reader External Optical Drive with M-DISC Support

It takes a bit of time to digitize the CDs – including proofreading the disc/track names that are usually filled in from a database on the Internet, and scanning or photographing cover art (if the menu item to get cover art does not work properly, which often it doesn't). Then you need to get the songs to your iPhone/iPad/iPod. I prefer to do this using manual synchronization (even though I have an Apple Music subscription).

WIth songs imported from my own Christmas CDs, I like to set the Genre of the songs and albums to "Christmas", no matter what the information filled in from the Internet suggests. This makes it very easy to see all the albums that are, specifically, Christmas albums.

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