Using Ambient Music On Your iPhone

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using Ambient Music on your iPhone. 

Ambient Music is a new feature in iOS 18.4. So make sure you have updated to that version first before looking for it. It's basically a set of buttons that you can add in Control Center to easily access some music playlists. These playlists help you quickly play some music to help you sleep or work or even relax. 

Control Center is, of course, what you get when you drag down from the top right corner, like that. This is called Control Center. Ambient Music is a set of buttons that you can add here. So let's tap and hold here in the blank space at the bottom and we go into the editing mode. This is where you can remove and move these around. I can tap here to add a new control. You get your basic controls here at the top and you can scroll up to see others. Ambient Music is near the top since it starts with the letter A and you'll see these four buttons here. So let's start by adding the Sleep one. I just tap this it adds a new button right here and this just has a little symbol on it with some zzzz's and a musical note. You expand it by dragging the bottom right corner it adds the name right there so you can see Ambient Music, Sleep and it will tell you whether or not it's playing. So you can decide whether you want it to be a large button or a small one. 

Once you have this added her to Control Center you can easily access it by going into Control Center and then just tapping the button. So what happens when you do? Well what happens is it instantly starts playing music. Now it's actually activating the Music App without launching the Music App. So it's not going to take you to the Music App. It's just going to start playing music. Notice here I've got the Now Playing widget for Control Center and it shows nothing is playing. But as soon as I tap this it actually starts playing some music and you can see the music that it is playing right here. It's not playing some sort of background music like the Background Sounds feature. So it is not just some sort of loop that just plays some noise. It actually plays real songs. You can see the song name there and you have controls and everything. You can Stop it by tapping the Pause button here just like any other music. You can tap the next button here to skip the song and go to Next. You can also tap the Ambient Music button here again and it will act the same as it pausing it. So you can Pause or Play by tapping this button. 

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Now even though it is using the Music App to play things you'll notice that your Music App is unaffected. If you're playing something else then it continues to show that there. But under Now Playing you'll see that it shows what it is actually playing, the Ambient Music track. So it is kind of acting like its own little background music app. 

Let's try adding another one. I'll tap and hold here, tap Add, and then go down to Ambient Music. Let's add the one here. This will play, as you can see, Chill. So when I tap this one it's going to play something different. It is going to play a song from a special Chill Music Playlist. I can tap on another one to have it switch to that. So it is just a quick way to play one of these playlists. But what are these playlists? 

Well, if we were to tap and go into Edit Mode here again and then tap on one of these you can see you get Controls just like with any of the other things in Control Center. In this case you get to choose the Playlist. I tap here I can see it actually gives me a list of four different playlists. In this case for the Chill button it is Piano Chill, Ambient Chill, Low-fi Jazz, and Pure Chill. I can also select from Library. If I do that it allows me to choose any playlist from my Library. So you can actually customize this. You can have it choose any other playlist you want. You can make up your own playlist and all of that. But here is the catch! That's if you have an Apple Music Subscription. So it seems like Ambient Music really is a feature of Apple Music that if you don't have a subscription you won't be able to use it. But that is not exactly true. I'll show you what happens if you try to use it and if you don't have an Apple Music subscription in a minute. 

But for now assuming you do you can choose anyone you want from your Library or go back to one of these. Now these aren't special playlists just for the Ambient Music buttons. These are actually real playlists here. If I now go to the Music App here and then I'm going to scroll all the way down and you can see here there is Moods & Activities, there's Chill, and if I look at the playlists here, under Popular Playlists, I'll actually find those playlists here. So these playlists aren't really anything new. You could have accessed them before. As a matter of fact some of the playlists listed I have actually been listening to for a long time. So really the buttons are just a quick way to start one of these playlists. You can setup these four buttons to actually access any playlists you want. It's just a quick way to start music going. You could, of course, previously have a playlist start using, say, a shortcut and put that in various places like on your Home Screen as well. 

You can also Add access to the Ambient Music feature in two other places. One is if you go in Settings and then you go to Wallpaper you can customize your Lock Screen and Home Screen. If you customize the Lock Screen you get these buttons here at the bottom. So, for instance, I've got Flashlight and Camera. I can take one of those away, let's take away the Flashlight one, and I'm going to tap on it to Add and in here I see the Ambient Music button. I can add say quick access to Sleep and now when I'm on the Lock Screen I can quickly have it start playing the Sleep Ambient Music Playlist. You can certainly see how that can be handy. 

If you have an iPhone that has an Action Button you can also go in there and then under the Control Section you can choose a Control and there's Ambient Music there as well. So you can have your Action button actually trigger one of these. 

So what if you don't have an Apple Music Subscription. Do these work at all? The answer is Yes, they do. A little bit different though. So here's a different iPhone and this one doesn't have an Apple Music Subscription. If I go to Control Center and I tap and hold, Add Control, and I go down to Ambient Music you can see it's still there. Let's go and add Sleep and it adds it there just as before. It works the same way too. So now if I tap here it will start playing and it will still play some music. But I don't have an Apple Music subscription. If I go to the Music App you can see here it's asking me to join and everything. So let's go back in here to Editing and let's tap here and take a look at the playlist setting here. If I look here I can see each one of the four Ambient Music buttons has a different set of playlists if you don't have Apple Music. My thinking is these are playlists of the special music that Apple has licensed particularly for this feature. You only get to choose these four. You don't get to choose your own. Which is a shame. You should be able to choose your own playlist of your own music. But also remember you can just go to Add a Control, go down to Shortcuts here, and add your own shortcut that just plays a playlist in the Music App. 

So I guess it is just nice that at least Apple hasn't made this completely exclusive to Apple Music subscribers. You can use the functionality regardless. You just get a lot more variety in what you can select if you happen to have an Apple Music Subscription.  So give this a try on your iPhone. It's one of those features that you're really not adding anything to your iPhone. You could have done this before by setting it up yourself. But just having that little bit of convenience there is really useful and a lot of people are liking this feature a lot. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.