How to put music on your iPhone without iTunes or a cable

What you need

• An iPhone with iOS 17 or later and Vaure installed (free).
• A Mac or Windows PC with a current web browser. Nothing to install on it.
• The iPhone and the computer on the same Wi-Fi network.
• Your music as files: MP3, FLAC, ALAC, AAC, WAV or AIFF.

Step by step

1. On the iPhone, open Vaure, go to import and choose Drop Web (“Receive from computer”). Vaure starts a receiver on the phone and shows a one-time code.
2. On the computer, open vaure.app/drop in the browser and type the code.
3. Drag audio files onto the page. Before anything is sent, Vaure checks for duplicates and for your library limit on the phone.
4. Keep both devices on the same Wi-Fi until the upload finishes. If the connection drops, the upload resumes where it stopped. You enter the code once; the session stays active for an hour, so you can add more files.
5. The tracks appear in your Vaure library on the iPhone and play offline, in airplane mode too.

Why not iTunes or Finder?

Apple's built-in route is to keep a library in the Music app on a Mac (or iTunes / Apple Devices on Windows) and sync it to the iPhone. That works if your whole collection lives in that desktop library. If you just want to copy a folder of files from any computer, including a friend's or a work PC, a browser and a code is quicker. The Music app also has no FLAC option, so FLAC normally has to be converted first; Vaure takes FLAC as is (see how to play FLAC on iPhone).

Other ways to get music into Vaure

Every method below copies the files into Vaure's library on the iPhone, so they play without a connection afterwards.

• Files app: pick files from iCloud Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or folders on the phone — any provider the iOS Files app shows.
• SMB share: connect to a NAS or a shared folder on your computer, sign in or join as a guest, and select tracks.
• WebDAV: connect to Nextcloud, ownCloud or any WebDAV server with your username and password.
• Direct link: paste a URL that points straight to an audio file.
• Another iPhone: a friend with Vaure nearby can send you tracks, albums or playlists with Nearby Drop; you confirm before anything arrives.

After the import

Vaure reads titles, artists, albums and covers from the files' own tags, then analyses each track on the phone. When the analysis is done you can press Vibe and Vaure will pick what to play next from your library — see how offline recommendations work.