Managing music on the Apple Watch is a nightmare

Hi,
I'm having the same issue, the whole reason I got an apple watch is so I wouldn't have to take my phone with me on the treadmill. So yesterday, I went to turn on some music, which I painstakingly downloaded to my apple watch (it took several days). Darn if it didn't start playing from the phone! I wish there was a way to force the watch to play locally stored music, not airplay it on the phone. I don't use airpods, so that's not relevant, but I do use a bluetooth headset, as I realize you can't play music on the speaker of the watch itself, which I think that's dumb, but it's understandable in a way. Anyway, I finally got it to play music from the watch when I turned my phone off, but that seems really counterproductive. So any tips would be much appreciated. I hope I didn't download all of my favorite music to the apple watch for nothing.

To my understanding apple watches up to series 9 cannot play music locally through the watch's speakers, don't know why? Apple watch series 10 can play through the speakers though, although I don't get why until the 10 can it do this? But yeah. You'll need headphones if using older watches than apple watch series 10 to my understanding.

I don't use spotify or apple music, at least not on my apple watch. Because the music I want on my apple watch is either too rare, and can't be found on streaming services, and I also like to put my music in smaller bytrate, so it saves space. The streaming services put quality over space, which is understandable, but I like having the control. Anyway, I found an app, it's called watch audio, it lets you take files, mp3, m4a, etc. from dropbox, files, I think any app that has the share sheet, and transfer them to watch audio. There is a free version, which lets you put 15 files into it, but for $3.99, you get access to a bunch of stuff, including transferring .zip files. I just started using it today, but what I think happens is the following. Let's say you have a zip file in your files app that contains 500 music files. You go into the watch audio app on your phone, double tap the button, which I think is labelled "plus", then choose file browser. Then, locate the zip file on your phone, and click open or done, whatever shows up. It will say unzipping, or extracting. Then, it will ask you to confirm the tags of the audio you're importing. Yes, that's tedious, especially if you have a lot of files, but just keep clicking add, which is the button that you'd click to "add tags", I think. Anyway, once you do that, open the watch audio app on your apple watch, and the transfer should start. A thing I like about the transfer process on watch audio is it says something like "392 out of 500 files remaining", and of course, as the files transfer, that number will decrease. As for the watch audio app on the watch itself, it seems accessible, and the music seems to play from the watch, not stream from the phone, yay!!!!!! Yes, there's a shuffle feature, if not, that would have been a major dealbreaker for me. I want to test this app on the treadmill tomorrow, when I purposely won't bring my phone in. But in rudimentary testing, it looked like the music played from the watch, because I have a headset that is paired with the phone and the watch, and I pressed the unlock button on my phone as the music was playing from the watch, and the phone didn't interrupt it. Also, when the music (apple music) would stream from the watch to the phone, I'd do something on the watch, and it would interrupt playback, I'm not getting that on watch audio, which makes me believe the watch audio app is playing audio stored on the watch itself.

I believe this is a problem related to bluetooth and distance from iPhone.
The bluetooth 5.x spec says max bandwidth of 2Mbps devide by at least eight to get bytes of data and that's 250K bytes per second. The watch appears to use the iPhone as its primary data source even though it has wifi that is quite capable of moving data wifi v4 802.11N is what the wifi radio is in the watch. Wifi uses much more power to do its work, and would significantly shorten battery life if it was used for any large amounts of data use; like using the cellular modem in the watch. I think the cellular modem is even more of a power burner.

You would only get the 250KBps at <= 30 feet or so. I know this is true, because those of us who use airpods know that if you go more than about 30 feet from the phone; they either quit or become very unreliable and I can't expect the watch to be any better than that. Also, if there are any walls having cement, brick or steel in them; the attenuation and path loss is even greater and that reduces usable distance further. After 30 feet the spec will half the bandwidth and at some distance it will drop down to the lowest bandwidth of 125Kbps which is about 15K bytes per second. At full speed it is easily possible to get good sound and short response (has low propagation delay). So if a song is 2.5MB in size it could take at least ten seconds (the shortest time possible) to get on to the watch and probably longer because of other radio signals on the bands that bluetooth uses (shared with wifi 2.4GHz band). I don't know if the watch uses its wifi for any downloads like that, because it's not easy to tell unless you could get a machine with wireshark on it and sniff the packets to get that information.

So, what I'd do is keep the iPhone near by when doing the music streaming and/or try to get the music you want to listen to on the watch before powering up your exercising routine.

Brian Borowski

I workout with my Apple Watch daily and, fortunately, have not experienced the problems you mention.
I have several playlists downloaded to my device, and pair my watch either to a pair of Bose Frames or Shockz OpenFit.
To play music, i simply invoke SIRI and name the playlist. With Cellular Access enabled, Apple music will stream any content I want direct from the watch.
I generally do not have my iPhone anywhere nearby, so I cannot tell how this may impact performance or cause the problems you report.
With regards to your Post Script, in order to have SIRI announce your workout milestones, simply turn VO off for the duration of your workout. This is clearly suboptimal, but by turning off VO once your workout has begun, you will receive the expected announcements as you workout.

Hope this helps