Filter Support

Filter needs Apple Music access to work — you'll be prompted to grant it on first launch, and you'll need an active Apple Music subscription to play catalog content. Once you're set up, open the Filters tab and tap Add Filter to create your first rule. Choose a type (Artist, Keyword, or Genre), enter what to match, and choose what happens when it matches.

Filter types:

• Artist — matches the track's artist name exactly.
• Keyword — matches any word in the track title or artist name (e.g. "remix", "live").
• Genre — matches Apple Music's own genre tags for the track (e.g. "Hip-Hop").

What happens when a filter matches:

• Skip immediately — the track never plays.
• Skip after a few seconds — the track plays briefly, then skips automatically (the delay is a few seconds by default).
• Play, but log — the track plays normally, but the match is recorded so you can review it later.

Mood-based filtering isn't available and won't be added — Apple Music doesn't expose per-song mood data through MusicKit, and Filter won't ship a filter type it can't honestly enforce or fake with a third-party service.

Sometimes you want a playlist to play differently from everything else — a guilty-pleasure playlist that ignores your usual filters, say. Open any playlist and tap the filter icon in the toolbar to manage this:

• Exempt from Global Filters: On — this playlist ignores your regular filters entirely.
• While exempt, you can optionally add filters that apply only to this playlist, replacing your global ones just for it.
• Turning exemption back off returns the playlist to your regular filters, and removes any filters you'd added just for it (Filter confirms first if you have any).

Tap Select in the Filters tab to multi-select filters, then use the bar at the bottom to Enable, Disable, or Delete everything you've selected at once. Bulk deletes ask for confirmation first.

In Settings, tap Export Filters to save your current filters as a JSON file via the share sheet — useful as a backup or to move filters to another device before setting up iCloud sync. Tap Import Filters to add filters from a previously exported file; duplicates are skipped, whether they match a filter you already have or another entry in the same file.

Export covers your global filters only. Filters scoped to a single playlist are left out on purpose — a playlist ID from one library means nothing in another, and importing them would quietly turn a playlist-only filter into a library-wide one. Settings tells you how many were excluded.

If you manually skip the same artist early in a track (within about the first 10 seconds) three times in a row, Filter will ask if you'd like to add a filter for that artist. Tap Add Filter to create a hard-block filter for them, or Not Now to dismiss it — either way, Filter won't ask about that artist again.

Skips a filter performs automatically don't count toward this — only skips you trigger yourself.

Open History in the Filters tab to see every track a filter has skipped or logged, grouped by day, with the filter that caught it. This is separate from the Filtered playlist — History is a timeline of what actually happened during playback; the Filtered playlist is a snapshot of everything in your library that currently matches. Tap Clear to erase your history; your filters themselves aren't affected.

Filter can scan your entire Apple Music library and build a real playlist — named Filtered by default — containing every track that matches one of your enabled filters. It's a genuine playlist in your Apple Music library, so it syncs across your devices and you can browse it from the Music app too.

Open the Filtered tab to see scan status and match count. Filter automatically rescans on launch if it's been more than 24 hours since the last scan, or you can tap Rescan Now at any time. Rescanning fully replaces the playlist's contents to match your current filters — so if you disable or delete a filter, the tracks it used to catch are dropped from Filtered on the next scan.

By default, your filters and history stay on this device only. To sync across devices, open Filters → Settings → Sync to iCloud and sign in with Apple. After signing in, quit and reopen Filter to start syncing — the app rebuilds its storage on launch to switch modes.

Turning sync off works the same way: confirm in Settings, then quit and reopen. Your existing filters remain on the device either way; nothing is deleted by toggling sync.

From the full-screen player or the queue, you can:

• Block artist — instantly creates a hard-block filter for the current track's artist. If you already have a filter for that artist but had switched it off, this turns it back on rather than doing nothing.
• Block 1 wk — swipe a track in the Up Next queue. It's removed from the queue and won't play again for a week, whether or not any filter matches it. If everything left in the queue is blocked, Filter stops skipping after ten in a row and plays the track rather than running the queue to its end; the player shows "Blocked for 1 week" when that happens.
• Swipe a queued track to remove it outright.

From the player's sleep menu, choose 15, 30, 45, or 60 minutes, or "End of track" to stop playback after the current song finishes.

Check the following:

1. Confirm the filter is enabled — a disabled filter shows an "Off" badge in the Filters list.
2. Check the filter's action. "Play, but log" is intentional — it never skips, just records the match.
3. For Genre filters, Apple Music's genre metadata sometimes takes a moment to load after a track starts, especially from a shared queue — a very brief play before skip can happen.
4. If several filters match the same track, the strongest action wins — "Skip immediately" beats "Skip after a few seconds", which beats "Play, but log". A track that only logs is being caught by a stronger filter's absence, not by nothing.
5. If you're playing a playlist you marked Exempt from Global Filters, your regular filters don't apply to it — only filters you added for that playlist do.
6. If ten blocked tracks came up in a row, Filter stops skipping and lets the current one play instead of running to the end of the queue.

Filter has no backend, uses no analytics or ad SDKs, and never sees your Apple Music credentials or your iCloud data. Your filters and history stay on your device, or in your own private iCloud account if you turn on sync. The "add filter?" suggestion feature keeps a small on-device counter of early skips — never synced, never sent anywhere.

Read the full Filter Privacy Policy.

Delete an individual filter by swiping it away in the Filters list. To remove all local data, delete the Filter app from your device.

To remove Filter's iCloud data, open Settings on your device, tap your name, tap iCloud → Manage Account Storage (or iCloud Storage), find Filter, and follow Apple's option to delete its data.