I listen to a lot of music in iTunes on my iPhone 6s, but the “library” section has dumb categories. I don’t have playlists, for example. Is there a way to customize what’s shown? I’m running iOS 10, if that matters.
Over the years, iTunes has picked up more capabilities and features than just about any other part of the Apple operating system and device world. It’s also gone through more facelifts and changes than any other part of both iOS and macOS at this point. So it’s indeed important to know what version of iTunes we’re talking about on your Apple iPhone when you ask about tweaking and changing iTune’s appearance. The latest version of iOS as I write this is 10.1 so that’s what I’ll show, but don’t be surprised if by the time your read this we’ll be on 10.2 or higher, and things will be slightly — or dramatically! — different.
Turns out that there are quite a few categories you can have in your Library view that offer you different ways to navigate through your music collection, and you can even sort them as you prefer so your favorite is at the top.
To start, simply go to iTunes on your iPhone:
You can see here that my default is Playlists, Albums and Genres. Except what I would prefer is to axe playlists (I never make ’em either) and replace it with Artists so that when I get a bug to hear Supertramp or The Rolling Stones or similar, I can quickly navigate and find it.
To do that, tap on the Edit button on the top right of the window. It’ll give you a full list of every category available, with a couple checked and a lot not checked:
Now you can see the wide range of different categories available! To swap Artists for Playlists, simply tap to uncheck Playlists then tap to check Artists.
While we’re here, however, tap and drag the three-horizontal-lines icon on the right side to move a specific category up or down…
You can see that I’m dragging Genres up. Actually Genres is what I most commonly choose and am so glad that this latest version of iTunes restores the shuffle feature at the Genre level. Done? Tap Done on the top right and you’ve got your new lineup:
Easy enough, really! Now, back to my music…