Is there a way for music to be downloaded to an Apple Watch

[mustbeperfect]

I have a non cellular Series 11 and I'm wondering if there's a way for music to be downloaded on the apple watch as well so that I can listen without my phone.

[jncmney]

Same. This is the main thing I’m missing and I haven’t found an app that does it. Ideally, I’d like to sync 2 playlists to my watch. A manual one and a smart playlist. And they should update when the watch is charging/syncing.

[faultables]

that’s pretty interesting! i think the reason why no app does that because we don’t have capabilities to do that, at least via public APIs. i believe this is platform limitations (watchOS) but happy to be wrong though!

[mustbeperfect]

Ah, that make sense. I should have thought of OS limitations considering it's Apple we are talking about here 🤣. While Apple Music and Podcasts are the only apps that have the nice auto downloading ui in the watch app, it seems Spotify premium has a "download to watch" button in the iPhone app. Although it seems they are taking advantage of caching API's and not actually downloading music to storage.

[jncmney]

I found this app that says it does sync playlists: http://www.rml-apps.com/avsub/guides.html#aw

I'm not sure if this is a hacky way of doing it though. It's manual, but it seems to do what we want!

[faultables]

@mustbeperfect currently the apple watch app is a companion app, so basically it work as a remote control for the flo app on the phone

i don’t think we can run a dedicated app on the watch as a standalone app (i mean as in “no iphone connected”), although that will be a great feature so i can run without bringing my phone with me

[docmeth02]

so i've actually been working on a standalone watchOS app for a while now, it runs completely independent from the iphone. you can browse your library, download albums and playlists directly to the watch, and play them back without your phone nearby using the downloaded files. there's also a transparent stream cache that pre-caches the next song in your queue while you're listening, so tracks you've played recently are available offline too.

downloads need to be triggered while you have a connection (wifi or cellular), so you'd want to grab your playlists before heading out. once downloaded everything plays back locally.

still working through some rough edges but the core is there — library browsing, downloads, offline playback, liked songs, stream caching, even internet radio when connected. the branch is here if you want to follow along: https://github.com/docmeth02/flo/tree/watchos

[faultables]

interesting. so we can install and run flo on watchOS only without the iOS version?

[jncmney]

I use Audiobookshelf for my audiobooks and both Prologue and plappa have both iPhone and Apple Watch apps. Both let you download audio books for offline listening to your Apple Watch. It's manual, but it works fine. I use Prologue mostly and it's pretty easy, as long as I'm at home on my LAN, I can browse my library and download audiobooks. Then when I'm away without my iPhone, I can open the Prologue Apple Watch app and play the downloaded audiobooks.

It'd be great if flo can do something similar. Download a playlist or an album to the Apple Watch for offline playing. And then sync the metadata back to the server when it's back online (e.g. playcount, last played, etc.).

I'm not sure if the app by @docmeth02 does this.