How to Set Album Artwork as Your Mac’s Screensaver and Use It to Play Songs
Choosing a screensaver is an essential part of customizing your Mac. And gone are the days when your only options were boring abstract and vector images. Today you have more choices to let your personality shine through.
If you’re a big music fan, imagine having a dynamic, interactive collage of your favorite album covers on your screen while your Mac is idle. cool right?
Well, here is a quick guide to help you set up Apple album art screensaver on your Mac.
Setting up the album art screensaver
You don’t have to manually download every album cover of your favorite songs to Apple Music and combine them into a collage – it would take hours. Instead, just go to your system settings and follow the steps below. It should only take a few minutes.
Click on that Apple Logo from the macOS menu bar and go to system settings > Desktop and screen saver.
That Desktop and screen saver Window should look something like this:
You have two options here. Take a quick detour and customize the desktop wallpaper on your Mac. Or just select them screensaver Field.
That screensaver The pane contains a long list of screensaver options on the left. Scroll down and select album artwork.
A collage with a random selection of your favorite songs on Apple Music should appear on the right.
Hover over this collage and click on it preview to see what your album cover collage will look like. Our screensaver preview looks like this:
However, yours would be a little different. You’ll notice that the default album art screensaver is displayed in five rows. However, you are free to add more lines to yours.
Press the spacebar or swipe your touchpad with three fingers to exit preview Mode. Then select Screensaver Options and choose your desired settings.
You can have up to eight rows and change each artwork from 0 to 5 seconds.
Play songs from your music library with album art screensaver
This screensaver isn’t just a collage of random album covers. Because Apple designed it as a dynamic and interactive screensaver option, it’s a unique way to play some of your favorite songs.
When your Mac is idle and the album art screensaver is displayed, hovering over each album art will display a play button. Click the play button to enjoy the selected song.
Remember that you cannot exit this screensaver simply by moving your cursor. Hover your cursor to prepare your Mac to play one of the songs displayed. So press escape on your keyboard when you want to exit the screensaver.
Hassle-free use of album art screensaver
If a track doesn’t appear on your album art screensaver, it may be because you didn’t download the track. And if you’re streaming your music instead, chances are you haven’t heard that song in a while and macOS efficiently cleared the files from your cache to make room for the files you use more frequently.
Every time you stream a song to your Mac, Apple Music performs a process called content caching – an efficient way to reduce your Mac’s Internet data usage. Apple Music stores relevant content on your Mac so it plays much faster the next time you stream the same song.
The best screensaver for Apple Music users
Screensavers were originally developed to solve a “burning” problem affecting many older computers. Leaving the screen on for a long time can affect the screen’s resolution and cause a static image to be burned into the display.
So the idea of displaying moving images and animations on the screen while it was idle was to prevent the quality of the computer display from degrading.
While many modern computers are no longer prone to burn-in issues, screensavers still add a touch of personality and an extra layer of security to your computer.