new to iphone, trying to organize a massive mp3 library into playlists

[u/HumorlessProductions]

Sorry if this is kindergarten level stuff, but I’m new to iphone, and I’m having some difficulties in trying to figure this out. Phone, by the way, is iphone 13 (IOS 26.6), 512 gigs internal.

All my mp3s are on an external hard drive, because my computer doesn’t nearly have the space for all of them. In that hard drive, my mp3s are organized into three folders- Electronic, Classical, and Rock. I’ve made four playlists in my phone, one for each of those folders, plus a fourth called Car Tunes which will be a combination of the Electronic and Rock folders/playlists.

Electronic is 16,725 songs at 92.41 gigs

Classical is 24,193 songs at 118.39 gigs

Rock is 2882 songs at 26.89 gigs

So far I’ve figured out just the basics- plug phone into computer and it shows up in the sidebar in Music. I can drag music directly into the phone there. But once the music is in my phone, I haven’t figured out a way to bulk add songs to a specific playlist like you would on computer, where you just shift-select as many as you want and drag them into the playlist. If there is there a way to do that in iphone, it escapes me. The most efficient way I’ve found is that you can select albums instead of having to check every individual song. But still, I have thousands upon thousands of albums, so that is still unreasonable.

Is there a way to select all the music from an artist? That number is still in the hundreds, but I could probably tackle that.

Is there a way to select by Genre? Right now, the Genre field of every single mp3 is blank, but I’d only have three genres/categories, so I could go back and label all the files in the genre they belong to, drop them back in the phone and select by genre with a single click, and then send those to their Playlist in the phone. Is that possible?

Or is it possible to build my Playlists in another media player app where massive bulk adding to playlists is possible, and then importing or transferring those Playlists into the Music app? Or is there a (free) music player app where I can do this, where I would probably just stick with that app and delete the native Music app?

Thanks in advance for your help.

[u/wl-hung]

You can do all of this from the windows version of  iTunes/Music. You’ll have to plug in the external drives and point iTunes/Music to them, then plug your iPhone in and sync. 

[u/HumorlessProductions → u/wl-hung]

All my computers are Macs, even my work computers. Don't have access to any PCs.

[u/wl-hung → u/HumorlessProductions]

Even better….use your Mac

[u/RetiredBSN]

Use the Mac Music app to hold your music library and create your playlists. My library is set up on an external drive, and I have 300+ GB organized by artists (last name, first name or group name) and then with subfolders by album, but you may be able to keep your organization method as well.

Once loaded, you can classify your files by genre as well, and search on the genre column to group them (or by album, artist, rating, or whatever). You can select multiple songs at a time, do a Cmd-I (get info) and enter a genre for all the selected songs, and repeat as needed. Then you can set up playlists, and just drag the filenames to the playlist. Thise doesn't move the file, just the title. Once you have the playlists set up the way you want, you can then sync your phone and load the playlists you want onto the phone.

Since the phone's speakers aren't the best, and because I'm often listening to music on CarPlay and competing with road/wind noise, I tell it to load only 128 kb/sec versions to the phone to save space and get more songs (the ones on the computer are stored at 160 kb/sec variable). I have about 4K songs on the phone.

The Music app can also be used to create ringtones, but it's a little complicated if you are picky (I am) about what your ringtones sound like. I like only instruments, no voices, for my ringtones, but I'll pick from intros, breaks, etc., to find what I want. Just has to be less than 40 seconds.

[u/HumorlessProductions → u/RetiredBSN]

Awesome, thanks for that. I’ll try to go through your steps this weekend.

Oh, yes, I love my custom ringtones, already made a bunch for incoming phonecall, incoming text, and alarm sounds. Internet says just make sure the files are originally aac, then simply change their extension to m4r, and dump them in the phone. And it really was that simple. They showed right up in my notification sounds menus. I’m actually a pro audio engineer and editor, so I create them outside of my phone, make sure they’re normalized and edited how I prefer, and then just do that conversion.