How to listen to music on Apple Watch without the iPhone
The Apple Watch has evolved to become more and more independent, so much so that we can use it to listen to our music. But not as if it were an independent speaker, but to avoid carrying the iPhone everywhere as the Apple Watch can be independent to listen to music.
What is needed
The first thing to note is that the Apple Watch cannot act as a music speaker. You must pair a wireless headset via a Bluetooth connection. It’s indifferent the brand of these headphones, but obviously the AirPods are the candidate par excellence when it comes to an Apple Watch. In this case the pairing is done automatically whenever they are linked to our iPhone making the task much easier. If we’re talking about other headsets, things change since the pairing will have to be done in the intelligent clock itself.
In order to perform this pairing, simply follow the steps below:
- In the Apple Watch, press the digital crown on the side.
- Go to ‘Settings’, symbolized by a gear as in iOS.
- In the ‘Bluetooth’ section you will start to track the equipment around you.
- Click on the Bluetooth headset you want to pair and it will automatically be paired.
Once your Apple Watch has a way to stream music, you can start looking into applications that allow us to play it.
Through Apple Music
Obviously if we are talking about the Apple ecosystem, it is mandatory to talk about Apple Music . This application, obviously, integrates perfectly into our intelligent clock to have on our wrist all the songs that we can play on our iPhone. This requires paying a monthly or annual subscription to Apple’s music service to have access to all the songs they make available to us. But it is not compulsory, because if we are not subscribed to Apple Music we can also play all those songs that we have stored. In this way we will be using the iPhone as the real focus of the music broadcast, being the Apple Watch an intermediary .
But if you want to keep your songs with you even if you don’t have your iPhone with you, you can make use of the storage in your Apple Watch. When we have a new clock, we can synchronize the songs in our library with the clock in a very easy way since we get the option as soon as we enter the app. But if this is not the case, the steps to follow to synchronize are the following:
- Make sure your iPhone and Apple Watch are linked.
- Open the ‘Watch’ or ‘My Watch’ application.
- Find the ‘Music’ application in the list and click on it.
- When you enter we can select the option ‘What you listen to most’ so that the songs you listen to most are always available on your watch. Or simply add music manually with the option found at the bottom.
It is important to have the Apple Watch connected to the dock. It will only synchronize if it is being recharged, as is the case with software updates.
Start listening to music without the iPhone
Once we have the songs we want in our Apple Watch we can start playing them even if we don’t have the iPhone nearby. To do so, simply click on the digital crown of the Apple Watch and look for the icon of the app ‘Music’ . Once here we can choose the song we want to play and also that the transmitter of the music is our own clock. If you don’t finish detecting the connection with the AirPods or with others, you will find the typical icon for ‘AirPlay’ to be able to choose them. Although this is rare, the Apple Watch always forces us to have a headset connected to play music.
Music Control
Once the music is playing, we can control it through the clock. With the crown we can easily raise or lower the sound , and with the on-screen controls we can pause/play a song or move to the next one. But this doesn’t stop here as in the lower left we’ll have three points that will give us access to options to edit the music source or activate the shuffle mode. In the other corner we can indicate if we like the song that is playing so that it recommends us more of that style, or introduce it to our library. These options are especially useful when using the Apple Music service.
With third-party applications
But not everything is Apple Music, as there are some applications that also integrate with the Apple Watch, although it has cost. Spotify after a big battle with Apple has finally managed to integrate its own application into the clock that works quite well. It also integrates with the AirPods and you can choose this bluetooth device to make the connection. In addition to the player control we have in the intermediate tab we can also access our library or all the songs on an album we are playing at the moment.
At the moment Spotify is the only third party app that supports good integration with the Apple Watch, although we do not rule out other applications being available in the future.
