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 allowing your personality to shine through.
If you are a big fan of music, imagine having a dynamic, interactive collage of your favorite album cover art on your screen while your Mac idles. Cool, right?
Well, here’s a quick guide to help you set up Apple’s album artwork screensaver on your Mac.
Setting Up the Album Artwork Screensaver
You don’t have to manually download each album cover art of your favorite songs on Apple Music and combine them into a collage—that would take hours. Instead, simply head to your system settings and complete the following steps. It should only take a few minutes.
Click on the Apple logo from the macOS menu bar and go to System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver.
The Desktop & Screen Saver window should look something like this:
You have two choices here. Take a quick detour and customize the desktop background on your Mac. Or, simply select the Screen Saver pane.
The Screen Saver pane contains a long list of screen saver options on the left. Scroll down and select Album Artwork.
A collage containing a random selection of your favorite songs on Apple Music should appear to the right.
Hover your cursor on that collage and click Preview to see what your album art collage looks like. Our screensaver preview looks like this:
However, yours would be a tad bit different. You’ll notice that the standard album art screensaver comes in five rows. But you are free to add more rows to yours.
Press the Space bar or swipe three fingers across your touchpad to exit Preview mode. Then, select Screen Saver Options and choose your desired settings.
You could have as many as eight rows and have each artwork change anywhere from 0 to 5 seconds.
Play Songs From Your Music Library With the Album Artwork Screensaver
This screensaver is not just a collage of random album artwork. Since 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 idles, and the album artwork screensaver comes up, hovering your cursor over each album art displays a play button. Click on the play button to enjoy the selected song.
Remember that you can’t exit this screensaver by simply moving your cursor around. Moving your cursor around prepares your Mac to play any of the displayed songs. So, press Escape (esc) on your keyboard when you want to exit the screensaver.
Using the Album Artwork Screensaver Without Issues
If a song on your album artwork screensaver doesn’t come up, it might be because you have not downloaded the song. And if you stream your music instead, chances are that you haven’t listened to that song in a while, and macOS has efficiently cleared the files from your cache to make space for the files you use more frequently.
Each time you stream a song on your Mac, Apple Music completes a process called content caching—an efficient way of reducing your Mac’s internet data usage. Apple Music saves relevant content to 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 that affected many older computers. Leaving the screen on for a prolonged period could affect the screen’s resolution and burn a static image to the display.
So, the idea of moving images and animations appearing on the screen while it idles was to prevent a deterioration in the quality of the computer display.
While many modern computers aren’t susceptible to burn-in issues anymore, screensavers still add a touch of personality to your computer, plus an extra layer of security.
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