I’m a big supporter of ambient music. It’s my favorite genre, mostly because I find it’s the best at setting mood — I’ll shuffle upbeat ambient tracks to relax, for example, and dark ambient when I’m brooding. That’s right, there are ambient subgenres, if you didn’t know. There’s even ritual ambient if you need a soundtrack to your Norse or Mesopotamian conquests.

Apple seems to have clued into all this to a degree, given an Ambient Music feature it’s introducing with iOS 18.4, currently in beta. In this guide, I’ll explain both what it does and how you can go about adding it to your own iPhone, with or without Apple Music. Most of these details also apply to iPads running iPadOS 18.4 or later, but I’m focusing on iPhones here for the sake of simplicity.

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What is Ambient Music in iOS 18.4?

Music to soothe the savage beast

The Orb

Essentially, the feature creates a series of themed playlist shortcuts in the iOS Control Center. Instead of opening Apple Music or Spotify and hunting for something to play, just swipe to open Control Center and boom, you’re off to the races.

Why make this a feature? That can be explained by Apple’s shortcut names — Chill, Sleep, Productivity, and Wellbeing. If you’re about to go to bed, or lock into a difficult work project, there’s an obvious appeal to getting in the right mindspace with a few taps. I know I find it difficult to take a nap without some sort of quiet playlist in the background, be it music, field recordings, or someone talking.

By default these shortcuts are linked to specific playlists on Apple Music, but you can change which ones they point to. That’s welcome, considering that Apple’s selections can be a little bland sometimes. Often the company skews towards smaller, generic-sounding ambient artists rather than more popular ones like Brian Eno, The Orb, or Stars of the Lid.

Some people report the feature working without an Apple Music subscription, so it’s worth a try even if you’re paying for something else, like Spotify or YouTube Music.

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How to use Ambient Music in iOS 18.4

Learn and love editing Control Center

Pocket-lint / Macrumors

Follow these steps to get started:

1. Update your iPhone to iOS 18.4 or later if you haven’t already. If the final release isn’t available, you can enroll in the Apple Beta Software Program, but I’d recommend against that on a mission-critical device. By definition, betas are unfinished and potentially crash-prone.
2. At your iPhone’s homescreen, swipe down over your iPhone’s battery indicator to open Control Center.
3. Tap the plus icon in the upper-left corner.
4. At the bottom, tap Add a Control.
5. Under Ambient Music, pick Sleep, Chill, Productivity, or Wellbeing. You can always come back and add more of these shortcuts later.
6. Back in Control Center, tap and hold on a shortcut to edit what it plays.
7. When you’ve got everything to your liking, simply tap on a shortcut when you want a playlist to start.

When you’re actually listening to something, you’re limited to basic track and volume controls, as well as AirPlay if you want to cast to a compatible speaker. The good news is that you don’t have to stay on the playback screen — music can continue in the background if you swipe it away. On an iPhone with a Dynamic Island, such as the iPhone 15 or 16, you’ll have access to tap-and-hold multitasking controls.

All of the above steps are essentially identical for iPadOS. The only meaningful differences are that the Control Center is squashed into the right side of your screen, and that there’s no Dynamic Island for iPads — at least, not yet.

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