Apple Music now lets you swipe to quickly add songs to your listening queue

If you use the stock Music app on your iPhone, iPad or Mac, you’ll be glad to know that Apple now makes it much easier to quickly add the current song to your listening queue or library.

In all list views, swiping from left to right will reveal a pair of hidden options. These permit you to quickly add the song to the top or append it to the bottom of your Up Next queue.

And if you swipe from right to left, a new “+” button should present itself. Touching that one will instantly adds the current Apple Music song to your music library.

These new features were discovered by an eagle-eyed commenter on Reddit.

Using swipe-to-add with Apple Music

Instead of multiple taps like before, you can now partially swipe on a desired song to append it to the bottom of the Now Playing queue. A full swipe from left to right will make the song play next by adding it to the top of the queue, as evidenced by the screenshot embedded ahead.

An iPhone screenshot of the Music app in iOS 14.5 showing the new swiping action to add songs to the Up Next queue

Before this change, the Music app had you tapping in multiple places like an animal and fumbling through the contextual menus just to add a song to your Up Next list. Spotify has a similar feature of its own, and now Apple Music gets it thanks to Apple’s iOS 14.5 update.

Unobtrusive contextual menus

Another important change is a redesign of the menus. No longer does hitting the ellipsis on the Now Playing screen invoke a popup menu which used to take over the whole screen. Instead, doing brings up a new overlapping modal that does not blur out the background.

An iPhone screenshot of the Music app in iOS 14.5 showing the new three-dotted inline menu with sharing and other options

But that’s not all — there’s a new three-dotted inline menu for one-tap access to features like getting an Apple Music link to the song or adding the song to the library via redesigned contextual menus that now have clear separators between categories of tasks.

When are the new features launching publicly?

The new swiping gestures, contextual menus and other new features in the stock Music app are available on the iPhone and iPod touch with the iOS 14.5 update and on the iPads powered by the iPadOS 14.5 software. They’re also coming to the Mac via an upcoming macOS update.

Apple is currently testing these updates with its developers and public beta testers. The general public will be able to use the new features once the updates drop around the spring.

iOS 14.5’s Music app also lets you share song lyrics as text via iMessage or Instagram.

Image credit: freaktheclown/Reddit