How to make an Apple Music playlist clean
Apple Music has no one-tap way to clean a playlist. There are two honest routes: swap the explicit tracks by hand in the Music app, or let RadioWash build a clean copy for you. This guide covers both, and when each one makes sense.
What “clean” means on Apple Music
Apple marks explicit tracks with a small E badge. A clean version is not a censored playback mode — it is a separate release, usually the radio edit, with its own entry in the catalog. That has two consequences worth knowing before you start: the clean version has to be found and added like any other song, and not every explicit song has one. When the artist never released a radio edit, there is nothing clean to swap in.
The manual way, in the Music app
- Create a new, empty playlist. Working on a copy means your original stays intact if you change your mind.
- Go through the source playlist and add every track that has no E badge — those are already clean and can come over as they are.
- For each explicit track, search Apple Music for the song title. Scan the results for a version without the badge — it often lives on the album's clean edition or on a single, and the artwork can look identical, so check the badge rather than the cover.
- Compare the track length before adding. A version that runs noticeably longer or shorter is a different edit — a live cut or an extended mix — not the clean version of the song you have.
- When no clean version exists, skip the song. Leaving it out is the only way to keep the playlist actually clean.
This works, and for a short playlist it can be done in a few minutes. The cost is that it is entirely per-track: there is no bulk operation, clean versions are easy to miss in search results, and the time scales with the length of the playlist. A long playlist means an afternoon of searching and badge-checking.
The faster way: a clean copy with RadioWash
RadioWash does the same work automatically. It reads a playlist you pick, matches each track to its clean version — by exact recording identifier first, by careful search second — and writes the result back to your library as a new playlist. Your original is never touched, and tracks with no clean version are left out rather than replaced with something that isn't the same song. Cleaning is free, with no track limit and no credit card.
The how-it-works page explains the matching in detail, including exactly when a track is omitted.
Either way, know this
- Your original playlist never has to change. Build the clean version as a separate playlist, whichever route you take.
- Some songs have no clean edit at all. A clean playlist that is honest about that will sometimes be shorter than its source.
- Both approaches need an active Apple Music subscription — the clean versions live in Apple's catalog, and adding them to a library requires one.