Syncing Music

After your watch is paired with your phone. You’ll need to make a quick trip into the Music settings to enable Wear syncing. Since you have to use Play Music to sync Music with your Android Wear watch. This might be a good excuse to upload your music library to it if you haven’t already. You’ll find the setting for Wear syncing toward the bottom of the main settings page.

Any music you keep on the phone is synced to the watch. So go ahead and find something you want to sync and tap the download button. It can be an album or a custom playlist. Oddly, the Music instantly starts syncing everything you select for offline caching on the phone over to the watch. Keep that in mind if you only want a subset of your offline Music on the watch.
To control what goes on the watch, head back into the settings and open the Manage Wear downloads menu. Which is below the toggle you used to enable Wear syncing. You can see each item that’s synced or in the process of syncing. Tap the watch button on the right of each line. To toggle sync on or off for each of them. So note the storage meter at the top that tells you how much space. You have for Music on the watch. You can also open the Music app on your watch. And choose what to sync based on the phone’s offline music list. This is a bit clumsier, though.

Pairing headphones

A few Android Wear watches have speakers inside. And needs to be enabled by the software. Even when they are, it’s doubtful your music would sound good coming out of them. That means you need to pair the watch with a Bluetooth device to listen to music from the watch. That can be either headphones or a Bluetooth speaker.

You will move over to the watch, open the main system settings, and scroll to Bluetooth devices. If your speaker or headphones are in pairing mode, they’ll pop up on the list. Just tap your watch, which should then connect. Note trying to play music on the watch without a Bluetooth device. Will result in an error message that routes you to this menu. You can disconnect from an audio device by tapping Unpair devices at the bottom of the Bluetooth menu.

Playing Music

To listen to the music you’ve synced to the watch, open the Music app on your wearable. It will ask if you want to play on the phone or watch; you want to select watch. You get a vertically scrollable list of the playlists and albums you’ve synced over. Tap any of them to listen, and tap again to pause.

You can swipe over to the right to access playback controls. These are the same ones you get when controlling music on the phone. Since this is all self-contained in the watch. You can leave the phone at home and listen on the watch. But, this will drain your watch’s battery pretty quickly. A few hours of playback before a recharge is needed.