How to make Apple Music do more with Siri voice commands

Posted:
in iPod + iTunes + AppleTV edited July 2015
While Apple Music has drawn a lot of comparions with other streaming services, like Spotify and Google Music, on iOS it does have at least one special trick: Siri voice commands.




On a basic level, listeners can ask Siri to play a song, album, or simply a collection of tracks by a given artist. Crucially, if music is already stored on an iOS device, Siri is more likely to prefer that content -- it just has access to the Apple Music library as well.

If a song is already in progress, asking Siri to play something new will prompt a question asking whether it's alright to go ahead, since that command automatically clears the Up Next queue. There are workarounds: listeners can say "after this play [insert song]" to add a song to Up Next, or just use "skip this song" if something good is already lined up.

In general Siri is fairly intelligent about recognizing which version of a song or album to play, gravitating towards the most popular releases. Asking to "play the album Lungs" is most likely to bring up the Florence & The Machine record, for instance. In some cases -- such as covers -- this can backfire, so it's often best to specify the artist and the song or album title at the same time.

Some more basic commands include "like this song" to "heart" a track, and questions such as "what song is this," "what album is this on," or "who sings this." To save content to My Music, people with iCloud Music Library turned on can say "add this song/album to my library."




Siri also has a few options for playing a song on a whim. Saying "more like this" will queue up what Apple thinks are similar songs, and there are several chart-based requests.




Users can ask to play the top song from a particular day, month, or year -- saying "top songs" instead will play the top 25. There are some limits though, as Apple's data only appears to go back so many decades, and doesn't include anything from the current month.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 12
    wurm5150wurm5150 Posts: 763member
    Huh.. Ok good to know. I will not be asking Siri to play the top song for 2001.
  • Reply 2 of 12
    crowleycrowley Posts: 10,453member

    Doesn't work for me.  Siri acknowledges the request, but no music plays.  Bit disappointing.

  • Reply 3 of 12
    yojimbo007yojimbo007 Posts: 1,165member
    Fantastic:) :)
  • Reply 4 of 12
    fahlmanfahlman Posts: 740member

    iMore posted an article of the exact same topic early this morning

  • Reply 5 of 12

    Works Great... Thanks!

  • Reply 6 of 12
    pslicepslice Posts: 153member
    Right now I'm not very comfortable with Apple Music, so I will hang on to my Pandora subscription.
  • Reply 7 of 12
    I love Apple Music
  • Reply 8 of 12
    The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • Reply 9 of 12
    -los-los Posts: 15member
    I can't say I love it but I do like it so far. ???? I have also never used Pandora or Spotify.
  • Reply 10 of 12
    alanhalanh Posts: 75member
    1st paragraph "comparions".
  • Reply 11 of 12

    Has iSir finally stopped auto shuffling albums? I stopped using it when it refused to play a selected album any way other than shuffled.

     

    I'm not a record producer, I'm a music consumer who likes album tracks to be played in the order the artist/producer intended.

     

    There would be outrage if iBooks shuffled the chapters in novels.

  • Reply 12 of 12
    This only works 50% of the time for me. When it works, its great. When it doesn't, it says that it's now playing xxxxx, but doesn't actually play anything nor move from the current page that Apple Music was on. I'm hoping that the version in IOS 9 beta is better here.
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