Chapter 8. Music & Videos
Of all the iPhone’s talents, its iPoddishness is among its most successful. This function, after all, gets the most impressive battery life (40 to 80 hours of playback, depending on the model). And there’s enough room on your phone to store thousands of songs.
In the Music app, five tabs greet you across the bottom: Library, For You, Browse, Radio, and Search.
Some of the app’s features are useful only if you’ve subscribed to Apple Music, Apple’s $10-a-month music service—but not all of them. The internet radio stations, for example, mean that you’ll never run out of music to listen to—and you’ll never pay a penny for it.
Note
If you’re not interested in paying for an Apple Music subscription, you can hide the two tabs you’ll never use (For You and Browse). To do that, open Settings → Music and turn off Show Apple Music.
The For You and Browse tabs disappear—and a new tab, Connect, takes their place. This is the mini-rock-band Instagram service described on the next page.
The bottom line: Your Music app might show you either of two different sets of tabs. Complicated? Yes. Anyway, this chapter is written as though you haven’t hidden the Apple Music tabs.
Apple Music
The Apple Music service, which debuted in 2015, is a rich stew of components. For $10 a month (or $15 for a family of six), you get all the features described in this section.
Tip
You can give Apple Music a free 90-day trial. After that, you’re charged $10 a month—unless you turn off the auto-renewal feature. To do that, tap the 
(on the For You tab in the Music app), and then choose View Apple ID → Subscriptions. Tap Apple Music Membership and then Cancel Subscription. (Note that your subscription ends instantly.)
If you don’t see Subscriptions, make sure you’ve signed in with the same Apple ID you used to subscribe.
Unlimited streaming music. You can listen to any band, album, or song in the Apple Music library of 40 million songs—on demand, no ads. It’s not like listening to a radio station, where someone else is programming the music; you program the music.
On the other hand, this is not like Apple’s traditional music store, where you pay $1 per download and then you own the song. If you ever stop paying, the music stops. You’re left with nothing.
If you do subscribe, you can tell Siri things like, “Play the top songs of 2005” or “Play some good running music” or “Play some Taylor Swift.”
But you’re not obligated to do all your music programming manually. Apple Music comes equipped with ready-made playlists, prepared by human editors, in all kinds of categories. There are sets of starter songs by various singers (“Intro to Sarah McLachlan”), playlists by genre and era, and playlists for specific activities like Waking Up, Running, Getting It On, and even Breaking Up.
You can freely mix the songs you’re renting with the music you already own. You can even download songs you don’t own for playback when you have no internet connection (as long as you’re still paying your $10 a month).
Beats 1 Radio. Apple runs a “global, 24-hour internet radio station” called Beats 1. (It actually broadcasts live for 12 hours a day, and then repeats.) Listening is free, even to nonsubscribers.
Live DJs introduce songs and comment on the singers, just as on regular radio stations. Of course, you have no input on the style of music you hear on Beats 1, and you can’t pause, rewind, fast-forward, or save anything you hear for later listening. It’s old-style radio, offering the magic of serendipity.
Connect. Connect is an Instagram-like service run by Apple. Here bands that Apple thinks you’ll like (or that you choose manually) can promote themselves by posting songs, videos, and other material. You can 6 these posts, share them, or comment on them.
iTunes Match. iTunes Match, which dates back to 2011, is a cloud-based version of your iTunes library, available to any of your Apple devices. For $25 a year, you can stream Apple’s copies of any song files you actually own—ripped from CDs or even acquired illegally. The advantages: First, you save a lot of space on your phone. Second, you can play them on any Apple gadget you own. Third, the versions Apple plays are often of higher quality than your originals.
iTunes Match continues as a separate service for non–Apple Music subscribers (the song limit is now 100,000 songs). But if you do subscribe to Apple Music, then in effect you get iTunes Match automatically.
iCloud Music Library. This is a newer service—a descendant of iTunes Match. This feature, too, matches all the songs on your phone with songs Apple has online, so you can play any of them on an Apple machine anywhere (once you’ve signed in). And if you have some songs Apple doesn’t have, you can upload them to Apple and thereby add them to your locker.
Note
Apple’s matching algorithms aren’t flawless; sometimes they don’t recognize and match a song that you and Apple both, in fact, have.
Another note: When you turn on iCloud Music Library, you’re offered the opportunity to delete all the music on your phone and replace it with what’s in your online locker. Back up your phone’s music before you do this (“On My Device”). There are occasional stories of people losing their entire music collections.
The Library Tab
Here’s all the music you’ve actually chosen yourself.
In the old days, this meant “music files that are actually on your phone.” If you have an Apple Music membership, though, you’ll also see online songs listed here that you’ve added to your personal catalog.
You can view them grouped in any of the lists you see here: Playlists, Artists, Albums, Songs, or (if you subscribe to Apple Music) Downloaded Music. Below all that, in the Recently Added section, you get thumbnails for albums and playlists you’ve recently downloaded or built.
Tip
There are other categories you could be seeing here, too, like Genres, Compilations, Composers, TV & Movies, and Music Videos. To add them to the list of headings—or to remove some of the ones that start out there—tap Edit next to the bold Library heading.
As you could probably guess, you operate the Music app by drilling down—by tapping from category to album to song or whatever. (Tap the top-left corner of the screen to backtrack.)
Playback Controls
When you tap the name of a song, album, playlist, or whatever, it plays. You can control playback—skip, rewind, and so on—in any of several ways.
The Now Playing Screen
If you tap (or drag upward on) the mini-player, though, the Now Playing screen appears (facing page, right). This time, there’s room for all the controls you need to manipulate music playback. Here are its contents, from top to bottom:
Tip
Swipe down to close this screen.
Album art. Most of the screen is filled with a bright, colorful shot of the original CD’s album art. (If none is available—if you’re listening to a song you wrote, for example—then you see a big, gray, generic musical-note picture. You can drag or paste in an album-art graphic—one you found on the web, for example—in iTunes.)
Scrubber. This slider reveals two useful statistics: how much of the song you’ve heard, in minutes and seconds (at the left end) and how much time remains (at the right end).
To operate the slider, drag the tiny round handle with your finger. You can jump to any spot in the song this way. (Tapping directly on the slider doesn’t work.)
Song info. The artist name, track name, and album name.
, 
(Previous, Next). These buttons work exactly as they do on an iPod: Tap to skip to the beginning of this song (or, if you’re already at the beginning, to skip to the beginning of the previous song). Tap to skip to the next song.Tip
If you’re wearing Apple’s earbuds, you can pinch the clicker twice to skip to the next song.
If you hold down one of these buttons, you rewind or fast-forward. You hear the music speeding by, without turning the singer into a chipmunk. The rewinding or fast-forwarding accelerates if you keep holding the button down.
Play/Pause button. The Pause button beneath the album photo looks like this
when the music is playing. If you do pause, then it turns into the Play button (
).Tip
If you’re wearing the earbuds, then pinching the microphone clicker serves the same purpose: It’s a Play/Pause control.
Incidentally, when you plug in headphones, the iPhone’s built-in speaker turns off, but when you unplug the headphones, your music pauses instead of switching abruptly back to the speaker.
Download (
). If this song is on Apple Music online (and not physically on your phone), then tap to download it for playability when you’re not on the internet.Add (
). This button appears only when you’re playing an Apple Music song; it adds the current song to your iCloud Music Library (“The Library Tab”).Volume. You can drag the round handle of this slider (bottom of the screen) to adjust the volume—or you can use the volume buttons on the left side of the phone.
AirPlay (
). Tap to send playback to an external speaker using AirPlay (“AirPlay”).Options (
). As always in this app, this button is a shortcut menu of options that might apply at the moment, as described next.
Incidentally, people go batty trying to find three important controls in the Music app: Shuffle, Repeat, and the Up Next queue (“Up Next”).
They’re all there—but you have to swipe up from the Now Playing screen to see them.
The Options Panel
The ellipsis () awaits on every Now Playing screen. Its choices depend on whether you’ve tapped some music you own (facing page, left) or some you’ve found in Apple Music’s collection (right). But here are some of the commands you might see:
Delete. If you’ve downloaded a copy of this song from Apple Music, well, here’s where you change your mind.
Download. Grab the song off of Apple’s servers, so you’ll be able to play it without an internet connection (for Apple Music or iTunes Match subscribers only).
Delete from Library. Gets rid of a song you actually own.
Add to Library. Adds the current song to your iCloud Music Library (“The Library Tab”).
Add to a Playlist. Lets you add this item to a playlist you’ve made.
Create Station. Makes a “radio station” full of music that sounds like this one (Apple Music only). See “Radio”.
Share Song. Opens the Share sheet (“The Share Sheet”) so you can send a link to this song via email, text message, Facebook or Twitter post, and so on. (The recipients can listen to the full song if they’re Apple Music subscribers.)
Lyrics. Holy smokes. Apple Music can show you a screen containing the lyrics of the song you’re playing. Who’da thought?
Rate Song. Tap to give this song a rating, from one to five stars. (Unfortunately, you can’t do much with these ratings—you can’t sort by rating, or make smart playlists by rating, or even use your ratings to affect the suggestions Apple Music makes. Ah, well.)
Love, Dislike. As you listen to music, tap these buttons to tell Apple when there’s a song you particularly love or loathe. When Apple’s magical computers suggest new music for you later, they’ll take these hints into account.
Tip
If you have a 3D Touch model (“Flick”), you can hard-press a song in a list (for example a playlist) to open the same Options menu. That is, you don’t have to burrow all the way to its Now Playing screen.
Control Center
The Control Center, of course, is the panel that appears when you swipe up from the bottom of the screen, or down from the top right of an X-class phone (“Control Center”). It includes playback controls, too. That means you never have to go to the Music app just to change tracks if you’re busy doing something else on the phone.
Playback While Locked
Once you’re playing music, it keeps right on playing, even if you change apps. After all, the only thing more fun than surfing the web is surfing it with a Beach Boys soundtrack.
If you’ve got something else to do—like jogging, driving, or performing surgery—tap the side button to turn off the screen. The music keeps playing, but you save battery power.
Tip
Even with the screen off, you can adjust the music volume (use the volume buttons on the earbud clicker or the buttons on the side of the phone), pause the music (pinch the earbud clicker once), or advance to the next song (pinch it twice).
What’s cool is that if you wake the phone, the Lock screen looks like the Now Playing screen. It has all the same controls, so you can manage the playback without even having to fully wake the phone.
If a call comes in, the music fades, and you hear your chosen ringtone—through your earbuds, if you’re wearing them. Squeeze the clicker on the earbud cord or press one of the volume buttons on the side of the phone to answer the call. When the call ends, the music fades back in, right where it left off.
Voice Control
There’s one more way to control your playback—a way that doesn’t involve taking your eyes off the road or leaving whatever app you’re using. You can control your music playback by voice, using Siri. See Chapter 5.
Playlists
A playlist is a group of songs you’ve placed together, in a sequence that makes sense to you. You might make one consisting of party tunes, another with romantic dinnertime music, and a third featuring drum-heavy workout cuts.
Creating Playlists
To play with playlists, start on the Library tab. Tap Playlists. Here are all the playlists you’ve ever created—which might be zero (below, left).
Here’s how to create one:
Click the giant New Playlist button.
A new screen appears, where you can name and set up your new playlist (below, middle).
Tap Playlist Name; type a name for your playlist.
You can also, at this moment, tap the little
button to take, or choose, a photo to represent this playlist, and type a description of it. This is also where you can decide whether to make your playlist searchable by others using Apple Music.Tap Add Music.
The Songs screen appears (above, right). It offers the usual ways to view your collection: Playlists (that is, existing ones), Artists, Albums, Songs, Videos, Genres, Compilations, Composers, and Downloaded Music. (A compilation is one of those albums that’s been put together from many different performers. You know: “Kazoo Classics,” “Zither Hits of the Late 1600s,” and so on.)
Tap the category you want for finding your first song; drill down until you find the music you want to add.
For example, if you first tap Albums, you see a list of your albums; tap
to add the entire album to the new playlist. Or tap the album’s name to view the songs on it—and then next to a song’s name to add it to the list.Keep adding music to the playlist until you’re satisfied.
You can keep tapping
buttons, without leaving this screen; each turns into a checkmark to indicate that you’ve added it (previous page, right). A playlist can be infinitely long; we’re way past the days of worrying about how much will fit on a CD.Tap every Done button until you’re back on the Playlists screen.
Your newly minted playlist is ready to play!
Using Playlists
To see what songs or videos are in a playlist, tap its name or picture. You arrive at a Playlist details screen, where your tracks are listed for your inspection. To start playing a song once you see it in the Playlist list, tap its name; you’ll hear that song and all those that follow it, in order.
Or tap the Shuffle button (
) to start random-order playback.
Tip
Here you can use a standard iOS convention: Anywhere you’re asked to drill down from one list to another—from a playlist to the songs inside, for example—you can backtrack by swiping from the left edge of the phone into the screen.
Or do it the long way: Tap 
at the upper-left corner of the screen. That button’s name always tells you what screen you just came from (My Music, for example).
Once you’re here, you can have all kinds of fun:
To delete or rearrange songs: Tap Edit. Use the
handles to drag the songs into a new sequence. Hit 
to make one disappear. (You’re not deleting it from your phone—only from this playlist.) Tap Done.To add more songs to the playlist: Tap Edit. Tap Add Music.
To rename the open playlist: Tap Edit. Tap the current title and edit away. (Tap Done.)
To delete the playlist: Open the playlist; tap the
to open the Options panel; tap Delete from Library. Confirm by tapping Delete Playlist. (Scary though that wording may sound, no music is actually deleted from your library—only the playlist that contains it.)
Up Next
Unless you’re a professional DJ, you’re probably happy to hear song after song played automatically, according to whatever album, playlist, or radio station they’re in.
But the Up Next playlist gives you a degree of control without requiring the full project of programming a playlist.
The Up Next playlist always exists. If you tell Music to play an album, Up Next autofills with the songs on that album; if you’re listening to all the music from a certain performer, Up Next displays what else you’ll hear from that artist. And if you tap any song in your library, everything after it gets added to the Up Next queue automatically.
But you can also queue up music yourself, adding songs to Up Next on your own schedule. The playback will plow through them in order.
Add a song to Up Next. Hard-press (or long-press) a song, album, or playlist to open the Options panel (below, left). Tap Play Next to put this song at the beginning of the Up Next queue, or Play Later to put it at the end of the queue. (Play Later is an option when you’re playing a playlist.)
Play a song now. Suppose you find some music you want to play right now. You don’t care about the Up Next playlist.
When you tap that item’s name, the iPhone asks: “After playing this, do you want to play the songs you’ve added to Up Next?” If you hit Keep Up Next, then you hear the new song without disturbing the Up Next list that will play afterward. If you hit Clear Up Next, then the new song plays and the music stops; you’ve nuked the current Up Next list.
If instead you hard- or long-press a song you want to hear, you get two choices: Add to a Playlist or Play Next. Add to a Playlist does just what it says. Play Next plays the song or album you’ve chosen and then resumes playing whatever is on your Up Next playlist.
View, Edit, or Clear the Up Next List
Most people probably never realize it, but you can actually look over the Up Next playlist in progress. You can rearrange or delete anything in it.
There’s only one way to see the Up Next playlist, and it’s pretty buried. You have to open the full-height Now Playing screen described in “The Now Playing Screen”, and then scroll up.
Once the list appears (previous page, right), you can remove a song from the queue by swiping left on it to reveal the Remove button; tap it. Rearrange the list by dragging the little “grip strip” handles up or down. (If you don’t see them, it’s because you’ve got your music on Repeat.)
Besides the Clear Up Next option mentioned above, the only way to clear the entire Up Next list at once is to force-quit the Music app (???) and then reopen it.
For You Tab
40 million is a lot of songs. You won’t live long enough to hear them all. So Apple has supplied the For You tab of the Music app to present new songs, performers, and albums its algorithms think you’ll like. (If you’re not already a paying subscriber, then this tab is just an ad for Apple Music.)
Scroll horizontally to see more tiles in a category; scroll vertically to see the playlists, albums, artists, and new releases Apple thinks you’ll like.
And how does it guess what kind of music you’ll like? When you sign up for the service, you’re shown dancing red circles bearing music-genre names. You’re supposed to tap the ones you like, double-tap the ones you really like, and hold your finger down on the ones you don’t like.
Then, of course, as you go through your life listening to music, you can always turn the 
button on or off to further fine-tune Apple’s understanding of your tastes.
Browse Tab
The Browse tab is also for paying subscribers only. It’s lists of lists.
Scroll down long enough, and you’ll find lists like New Music, Playlists (music lists, created by Apple’s editors, for particular genres, activities, and moods), Music Videos, Top Charts, and Genres. Once again, the idea is to help you find new stuff you like.
Radio
Your iPhone includes an amazing gift: your own radio station. Your own empire of radio stations, in fact.
They come in two categories: Free and Custom.
Free Stations
What you see on the Radio screen depends on whether or not you’ve turned off Show Apple Music, as described in Chapter 8.
If that’s turned off, then you see only free stations here: Beats 1 (the Apple live station described in ???) and some streaming stations like CBS, NPR, ESPN, and Bloomberg. These are free internet radio stations.
Subscriber Stations
If Show Apple Music is turned on, then this screen offers ready-made “radio stations” that Apple has supplied for you. If you’re a subscriber, they play; if not, they give you an ad inviting you to sign up.
Tap Radio Stations to find more ready-to-play, software-curated “radio stations” in every conceivable category: Country, NPR, ESPN, Oldies, Soul/Funk, Chill, Indie, Classic Metal, Pop Workout, Kids & Family, Lullabies, Latin Pop, Classical, Reggae, and on and on.
You can hit to skip a song you’re not enjoying. And you don’t hear any ads.
Custom Stations
If you’re a paid subscriber, the Radio service offers more than canned stations; you can create a new “station” instantly, based on any “seed” song you choose.
You don’t get to choose the exact songs or singers you want to hear; you have to trust Radio to select songs based on your chosen song, singer, or music genre. For example, if you choose Billy Joel as your “seed,” you’ll hear a lot of Billy Joel, but also a lot of other music that sounds more or less like his.
To set up a new “radio station” of your own, find a song, band, or album you like. Hard-press or long-press it to open the Options menu (“Flick”)—and tap Create Station.
You’ve just created a new station, and it begins playing instantly.
Tip
While a custom station plays, you can tap the 
on its Now Playing screen to see two new buttons: Play More Like This and Play Less Like This. That kind of feedback fine-tunes your custom station for future use.
The idea of a “seed song”–based radio service isn’t new, of course. It’s the same idea as Pandora, a website and app that has offered precisely the same features for years. But Radio is built in, it’s incorporated with Siri and the Control Center, and it’s part of Apple’s larger ecosystem; that is, you can see your same set of “radio stations” on your Mac or PC (in the iTunes app), iPad, and Apple TV.
Returning to a Custom Station
On the main Radio screen, the Recently Played list shows all the stations you’ve listened to. Tap to start playing.
Siri and Radio
Truth is, there’s an easier way to create a custom radio station: Just let Siri do the work. No matter what you’re doing on the iPhone, you can hold down the home button (or, on the X-class iPhones, the side button) and say, for example, “Start a station from Whitney Houston.” Boom: The music begins.
Actually, Siri comes equipped to recognize a slew of commands pertaining to Radio. Here’s a sampler; you don’t have to use these precise wordings:
Play some Selena Gomez (or any song, album, or artist).
Play the radio.
What song is this?
Play more like this.
Don’t play this song again.
Pause the music. (Resume the music.)
Skip this song.
Add this song to my Wish List.
Stop the radio.
Speakers and Headphones
The iPhone’s speakers are pretty darned good for such a tiny machine. But the world is full of better speakers—Bluetooth wireless speakers, car stereo systems, hi-fi TVs, and fancy earbuds and headphones. The iPhone is especially easy to use with them.
Bluetooth Wireless Speakers
You can buy amazingly small, powerful Bluetooth stereo speakers that receive your iPhone’s music from as far as 20 or 30 feet away—made by JBL, Bose, and others.
There are also wireless Bluetooth headphones and earbuds—an especially useful fact if your iPhone lacks a headphone jack (iPhone 7 and later).
Once you’ve bought your headphones or speakers, you have to introduce them to the iPhone—a process called pairing.
From the Home screen, tap Settings → Bluetooth. Turn Bluetooth on (below, left); you see the Searching 
animation as the iPhone wirelessly hunts for your headphones or speakers.
Grab them, turn them on, and start the pairing procedure, as described in the manual. Usually that means holding down a certain button until a tiny light starts flashing. At that point, the name of the headphones or speaker appears on the iPhone’s screen.
Tip
If the headphones or speaker require a one-time passcode—it’s usually 0000, but check the manual—the iPhone’s keyboard appears, so you can type it in.
A few seconds later, it says Connected; now any sound the iPhone would ordinarily play through its speakers or earbuds instead plays through the wireless headphones or speakers. Not just music, but chirps, game sounds, and so on. Oh, and phone calls.
If your headset has a microphone, too, then you can answer and make phone calls wirelessly. (There’s an Answer button right on the headphones.)
Using Bluetooth wireless stereo does eat up your battery charge faster. But come on: listening to your music without wires, with the iPhone still in your pocket or bag? How cool is that?
Switching Among Speakers
When your iPhone has a connection to a wireless sound source—Bluetooth speakers/earbuds or an AirPlay receiver, for example—you need some way to direct the music playback to it.
The answer is the 
button. It’s on the Control Center (“Control Center”), but it’s hidden: You have to hard-press or long-press the music-playback controls to see it.
When you tap , the iPhone offers a button for each speaker or set of earbuds or headphones (facing page, right). Tap the one you want.
Instantly, the sound begins flowing from your other source. Use the same method to switch back to the iPhone’s speakers when the time comes.
AirPods
Ever since Apple ditched the headphone jack (“iPhone 7, 8, X-Class: No Headphone Jack”), it’s offered for sale the wireless, detached AirPods as an alternative.
When you’re listening to music over AirPods, you can control music playback by double-tapping the device in your ear; each one (right and left) can have a different effect. In Settings → Bluetooth, tap the 
next to the AirPods’ name; you’ll see that double-tapping the left one can trigger Siri, Play/Pause, Next Track, Previous Track, or do nothing (Off)—and you have the same choices, independently, for the right one.
Unfortunately, changing the volume, or performing any control function other than the two you’ve assigned to double-taps, still requires a Siri command (or pulling out your phone).
AirPlay
There’s another way to transmit audio wirelessly from the iPhone (and video, too): the Apple technology called AirPlay. You can buy AirPlay speakers, amplifiers, and TV sets. The Apple TV, of course, is the best-known AirPlay machine; Apple’s HomePod is another one.
AirPlay is described in “AirPlay”, because most people use it to transmit video, not just audio. But the steps for transmitting to an AirPlay audio gadget are the same.
Music Settings
The iPhone has a long list of traditional iPod features for music playback. Most of these options await in Settings → Music. (Shortcut: Tell Siri, “Open Music settings.”)
EQ (Equalization)
Like any good music player, the iPhone offers an EQ function: a long list of presets, each of which affects your music by boosting or throttling various frequencies. One might bring out the bass to goose up your hip-hop tunes; another might emphasize the midrange for clearer vocals; and so on. (“Late Night” is especially handy; it lowers the bass so it thuds less. Your downstairs neighbors will love it.)
You’ll find the EQ feature way down in the Music Settings page.
Volume Limit
It’s now established fact: Listening to a lot of loud music through earphones can damage your hearing. Pump it up today, pay for it tomorrow.
Portable music players can be sinister that way, because in noisy places like planes and city streets, people turn up the volume much louder than they would in a quiet place, and they don’t even realize how high they’ve cranked it. That’s why Apple created this volume slider. It lets you limit the maximum volume level of the music.
In fact, if you’re a parent, you can even lock down this setting so your kid can’t override it with a password. But it’s a slog: Open Settings → Screen Time → Content & Privacy Restrictions; turn on Content & Privacy Restrictions; scroll down to Media & Apple Music; turn on Don’t Allow Changes.
Finally, you can add the actual password. Return to the main Screen Time settings. Scroll down and tap Use Screen Time Passcode; set a passcode for it.
Sound Check
This feature smooths out the master volume levels of tracks from different albums, compensating for differences in their recording levels. It doesn’t deprive you of peaks and valleys in the music volume, of course—it affects only the baseline level.
Playing Music from Your Computer
Here’s a trick you weren’t expecting: You can store many terabytes of music on your Mac or PC upstairs—and play it on your phone in the kitchen downstairs. Or anywhere on the same Wi-Fi network, actually.
This nifty bit of wireless magic is brought to you by Home Sharing, a feature of the iTunes program.
Here’s the setup: In iTunes on the Mac or PC, open iTunes → Preferences. Click Sharing, and turn on Share my library on my local network. (You can share only certain playlists, if you like.) Turn on Require password, if you like, and enter your Apple ID password. Click OK. Then choose File → Home Sharing and select Turn On Home Sharing.
Now pick up your phone. At the bottom of the Settings → Music screen, log into Home Sharing using the same Apple ID and password.
Now you’re ready to view the contents of your computer on the phone. You’d never guess where they’re hiding.
In the Music app, on the Library tab, tap Home Sharing; on the next screen, choose your computer’s name. (Note that the Home Sharing heading doesn’t appear unless your computer is turned on and iTunes is open.)
That’s it! Suddenly, your entire Music app is filled with the music from your computer’s collection, rather than the music on the phone.
The iTunes Store
Just as you can buy apps using the App Store app, you can browse, buy, and download songs, TV shows, and movies using the iTunes Store app. Anything you buy gets autosynced back to your computer’s copy of iTunes when you get home. Whenever you hear somebody mention a buy-worthy song, you can have it within a minute.
To begin, open the iTunes Store app. The store you see here (next page, left) is modeled on the App Store described in Chapter 10. This time, the buttons at the bottom of the screen include Music, Movies, TV Shows, Search, and More.
When you tap Music, Movies, or TV Shows, the screen offers further buttons. In Music, for example, the scrolling horizontal rows of options might include New Releases, Recent Releases, Singles, and Pre-Orders.
(Beneath each list is a Redeem button, which you can tap if you’ve been given an iTunes gift certificate or a promo code; a Send Gift button, which lets you buy a song or video for someone else; and an Apple ID button, which can show you your current credit balance.)
Tip
You can’t buy TV shows or movies on the cellular network—just in Wi-Fi hotspots. That’s your cell company’s way of saying, “We don’t want you jamming up our precious cellular network with your hefty video downloads, bucko.”
Note, by the way, that you can rent movies from the store instead of buying them outright. You pay only $3 to $6 to rent (instead of $10 to $16 to buy). But once you start watching, you have just 48 hours to finish; after that, the movie deletes itself from your phone. (If you like, you can sync it to your Mac or PC to continue watching in iTunes—but still within 48 hours.)
To search for something in particular, tap Search. The keyboard appears. Type what you’re looking for: the name of a song, movie, show, performer, or album, for example. At any time, you can stop typing and tap the name of a match to see its details. You can use the buttons across the top to restrict the search to one category (just songs or movies, for example).
Tip
Sometimes it’s quicker to search directly from the search bar, which can search the iTunes Store directly.
All these tools eventually take you to the details page of an album, song, or movie. For a song, tap its name to hear an instant 90-second preview (tap again to stop). For a TV show or movie, tap to watch an ad or the sneak preview.
If you’re sold, then tap the price button to buy the song, show, or album (and tap Buy to confirm). Enter your Apple ID password when asked. (For movies, you can choose either Buy or Rent, priced accordingly.) At this point, your iPhone downloads the music or video you bought.
Purchased Items
Anything you buy from the iTunes Store winds up in the appropriate app on your iPhone: the TV app for TV shows and movies, the Music app for songs. (Within the Music app, everything you’ve bought that isn’t on the phone shows up with a 
icon next to its name.)
In the iTunes Store app, you can tap More and then Purchased to see what you’ve bought. Once you tap a category (Music, Movies, TV Shows), you get a list of everything you’ve bought from iTunes, on your iPhone or on any other Apple machine. You can tap the name of something that’s Not on This iPhone—and then download it (tap ). No extra charge.
Tip
If you prefer, you can direct your phone to download those purchases you make on other gadgets automatically, without your having to tap Not on This iPhone. Visit Settings → iTunes & App Store, and turn on the switches for Music, Apps, and/or Books & Audiobooks under Automatic Downloads. If you also turn on Use Cellular Data, then your phone will do this auto-downloading when you’re in any 3G or LTE cellular internet area, not just in a Wi-Fi hotspot.
More in “More”
Tapping More at the bottom of the screen offers these options:
Tones. You can buy ready-made ringtones on this page—30-second slices of pop songs. (Don’t ask what sense it makes to pay $1.29 for 30 seconds of a song when you could buy the whole song for the same price.)
Genius. Apple offers a list of music, movies, and TV shows for sale that it thinks you’ll like, based on stuff you already have.
Purchased. Here’s another way to examine the goodies you’ve bought on all your devices. If you’ve turned on Apple’s Family Sharing feature (“Family Sharing”), you can also examine everything your family members have bought.
Downloads. Shows you a progress bar for anything you’ve started to download.
Tip
If you tap Edit, you’ll see that you can replace any of the four iTunes Store bottom-row icons with one of the More buttons (Tones, Genius, Purchased, or whatever). Just drag one of these icons directly downward on top of an existing icon.
So you’ve downloaded one of the store’s millions of songs, podcasts, TV shows, music videos, ringtones, or movies directly to your phone. Next time you sync, that song will swim upstream to your Mac or PC, where it will be safely backed up in iTunes. (And if you lost your connection before the iPhone was finished downloading, your Mac or PC will finish the job automatically. Cool.)
The TV App
This weird hybrid app is intended to serve as a single repository for paid TV shows and movies online, in these three categories:
Videos you’ve bought or rented from Apple’s iTunes Store. In this regard, the TV app takes over the functions of the dearly departed Videos app.
Paid video-service apps like Showtime, Hulu, and HBO Go. A few of these apps work with the TV app’s “single sign-on” feature, meaning that you can enter the name and password for your cable account once, and thereafter you’re spared having to enter it into each individual app.
Channels your cable package provides. Or at least those that have apps: ABC, A&E, AMC, TBS, and so on. Each one requires that you provide your cable or satellite TV account name and password. (Here again, a few may work with the single sign-on feature, meaning you don’t have to sign in individually.)
Tip
Even if you don’t have a cable subscription, there’s some free stuff you can watch in this app. Visit Store → Buy or Rent on iTunes → Free Episodes.
There are also some channel apps that are free to watch without a subscription, including PBS, PBS Kids, CBS Sports, ABC News, and The Weather Channel.
The TV app works with over 100 video services—but Netflix, alas, is not among them. (Although if you have the Netflix app, the TV app offers to redirect you there to watch something you’ve searched for.)
Until more players join the party, here’s how to use the TV app.
Five Tabs
The buttons across the bottom clearly exhibit the TV app’s split personality (split between iTunes purchases and cable-channel apps):
Watch Now. An App Store–ish page of suggestions for shows and movies available to watch. The Up Next row at top is especially handy; it lists new episodes of shows you’ve already been watching.
Sports. This tab lists, among other sports shows, any sports TV that’s on right now. Unfortunately, it lists all of them, even from channels you don’t subscribe to. Still, pretty cool.
Library. TV and movies you’ve bought or rented from Apple.
Store. Browse TV shows and movies available to rent or buy. Here, too, are icons for all the channel apps (ABC, A&E, AMC, and so on) available to download.
Search. If you know what you’re looking for, the search box is the best way to find it.
How to Play a Video
When you tap a video’s thumbnail, it either opens up in the corresponding channel app—or, if it came from Apple, it opens a Details screen (plot summary, year of release, and so on).
Note
If you see a on the Details screen, it means that this bought or rented movie is not actually on your phone. If you have a good Wi-Fi signal, you can watch it right now by streaming it (instead of downloading it to your phone).
If you don’t see that icon, then the video file is actually on your phone. An Edit button appears, which you can tap (and then tap 
) to delete the video.
Tap your way to the button to begin watching.
When you’re playing an Apple video, anything else on the screen is distracting, so Apple hides the video playback controls. Tap the screen once to make them appear and again to make them disappear.
Here’s what they do:
Done. Tap this button, in the top-left corner, to stop playback and return to the master list of videos.
Scroll slider. This progress indicator (top of the screen) is exactly like the one you see when you’re playing music. You see the elapsed time, the remaining time, and a round handle that you can drag to jump forward or back in the video.
Tip
Drag your finger farther (up or down) from the handle to choose a faster or slower scrubbing speed.
Zoom/Unzoom. In the top-right corner, a little
or 
button appears if the video’s shape doesn’t exactly match your screen. Tap it to adjust the zoom level of the video, as described in a moment.Play/Pause (
/
). These buttons (and the earbud clicker) do the same thing to video as they do to music: alternate playing and pausing.Previous, Next (
, ). Hold down your finger to rewind or fast-forward the video. The longer you hold, the faster the zipping. (When you fast-forward, you even get to hear the sped-up audio.)
If you’re watching a movie from the iTunes Store, you may be surprised to discover that it comes with what were once called DVD Extras: chapter markers, deleted scenes, and so on. To see the buttons for these goodies (shown above), tap the screen.
Tip
If you’re wearing the earbuds, you can pinch the clicker twice to skip to the next chapter, or three times to go back a chapter.
Volume. Use this slider (bottom of the screen) to adjust the volume—or use the volume buttons on the left side of the phone.
Language (
). You don’t see this button often. But when you do, it summons subtitle and alternate-language soundtrack options.AirPlay (
). This symbol appears if you have an Apple TV (or another AirPlay-compatible device). Tap it to send your video playback to the TV, as described in “AirPlay”.
Tip
To delete a video from the library, swipe leftward across its name in the Videos list; tap Delete to confirm. (You can always re-download it, of course.)
Zoom/Unzoom
Pre-HDTV shows are squarish, not rectangular. So when you watch older TV shows on a rectangular screen, you get black letterbox columns on either side of the picture.
Movies have the opposite problem. They’re usually too wide for the iPhone screen. So when you watch movies, you may wind up with horizontal letterbox bars above and below the picture.
Some people can’t stand letterboxing. You’re already watching on a small screen; why sacrifice some of that precious area to black bars?
Fortunately, the iPhone gives you a choice. If you double-tap the video as it plays, you zoom in, magnifying the image so it fills the entire screen. Or, if the playback controls are visible, you can also tap or . Of course, now you’re not seeing the entire original composition. You lose the top and bottom of old TV scenes, or the left and right edges of movie scenes.
Fortunately, if this effect chops off something important—some text, for example—the original letterbox view is just another double-tap away. (No zooming happens if the source material is already a perfect fit for the iPhone’s screen shape.)
X-Class
Ordinarily, videos don’t extend into the area occupied by the notch (“X-Class Phones: The Notch”). When you double-tap to zoom a video, though, playback fills the entire screen—and part of it is now obscured by the notch. You get used to it.
TV Output
When you crave a screen bigger than a few inches, you can play your iPhone’s videos on a regular TV. All you need is a cable: the Apple Digital AV Adapter. It carries both audio and video over a single HDMI cable.
It mirrors what’s on the phone: your Home screen, email, Safari, and everything else. (Photos and presentations appear on your TV in pure, “video outputted” form, without any controls or other window clutter.)
AirPlay
Your iPhone also offers wireless projection, thanks to a feature called AirPlay. It transmits music or high-def video, with audio, from your iPhone to an Apple TV (or another AirPlay-equipped receiver) across the room. It’s a fantastic way to send video, slideshows, presentations, games, FaceTime calls, and websites to your TV for a larger audience to enjoy. Whatever is on the screen gets transmitted.
AirPlay receivers include the Apple TV (version 2 or later) and speakers, stereos, and receivers from Denon, Marantz, JBL, iHome, and so on. The phone and recent AirPlay receivers no longer have to be on the same Wi-Fi network, thanks to a feature called peer-to-peer AirPlay.
When you’re playing a video or music, open up the Control Center (“Control Center”), and tap to see a list of available AirPlay receivers. If you have an Apple TV, tap its name. (If this is your first time, then enter the four-digit code you see on the TV.)
Tip
If you’re playing a TV show or movie from within the TV app, use the button there instead of the one on the Control Center. That way, the video continues to play on your TV—but on your phone, you can duck out of the TV app and do other things.
Everything on the iPhone screen now appears on the TV or sound system. (The icon appears on the playback controls and in the Control Center, so you don’t forget that every move you make is visible to everyone in the living room.)
How to Project or Record the iPhone’s Screen
If you’re a teacher, trainer, or product demonstrator, you might find it useful to be able to project the iPhone’s activity on a much larger screen, or to record it as a QuickTime movie to use in presentations or to post online. Here are three ways to go about it:
The built-in way. You can create video recordings of your iPhone’s screen, using the Control Center (see “Control Center”). Once captured, you can move the movie to a computer and project it from there, or display it directly from your iPhone to a large video screen using AirPlay or the Apple Digital AV Adapter.
The Mac way. If your Mac has OS X Yosemite or later, connect the phone to the Mac with its white USB charging cable. Open the Mac app called QuickTime Player. Choose File → New Movie Recording. From the little
menu next to the 
button, choose iPhone.Now you’re seeing the iPhone’s screen on your Mac—and you can record it, project it, or screen-capture it for future generations!
The wireless way. A $15 program called Reflector (reflectorapp.com) lets you view the iPhone’s live image on the Mac’s screen—and hear its sound. (It actually turns the Mac into an AirPlay receiver.) There’s also a Record command, so you can create a movie of whatever you’re doing on the phone.