Can you play music on the Garmin Vivosmart HR?

There are quite a few players in the world of fitness trackers and Garmin has established themselves as one of the best. Their fitness trackers are consistently well reviewed and the Vivosmart HR is no exception. It gives you all the typical, important functions you need for tracking your workouts such as steps, distance, calories, etc., but it also connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth to give you even more functionality.

It's not too much of a stretch to say that music is one of the things that connects the entire human race together. Music can inspire us, give us confidence, help us through tough times, connect us to loved ones, and so much more. One of the biggest ways music can help us is to keep us motivated during difficult workouts. I think you would be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't use music to help motivate themselves during a workout.

Workouts are hard enough on their own so any distraction can be quite annoying. Thankfully the Vivosmart HR is small, thin, and light and it sits comfortably on your wrist so it's not distracting. However, sometimes the absolute wrong song comes on in the middle of your hardest interval and you need a new song asap. Good news for you is that Garmin added in music controls to the Vivosmart HR so with a simple tap, you can change up the song to help push you through those painful last seconds.

While these controls are super helpful, they are still frustratingly limited. For instance, they will default to the last music/podcast player that was last used on your phone and there's no way to pick a default music player. Also, it doesn't quite fully support certain music players such as Amazon Music. There actually used to be a way to choose a default app but for some reason, they removed it in a recent software update. There have also been reports of the controls having somewhat spotty functionality with many folks saying it's hit or miss as to whether or not it will work at the moment. Uninstalling and reinstalling the Garmin Connect app seems to help and Garmin is aware of the issue and is working on a fix.

I don't usually fuss too much with my music during a workout as I'm either using a pre-built playlist or I'm streaming and just skip to the next song so I wouldn't be too worried about this but you workout flow may differ.