How to Backup Music to iCloud from iPhone or PC

Updated Jan 04,2019 | by Cody

If you have upgraded your iCloud plan, then you will have enough storage to store music on iCloud. In this article, I will show you how to backup music to iCloud and play them on your iPhone. Actually, you can also directly download MP3 music to iPhone and save them to iCloud.

The short answer is “No”. iCloud Backup is a great feature that makes a copy of the information on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. iCloud backup includes settings, app data, messages, ringtones, purchase history, etc.

If you have an Apple Music subscription and you turn on iCloud Music Library, then you all your music on iPhone are also saved in iCloud Music Library, but you cannot view them in iCloud. It does not consume your iCloud storage space. Don’t worry, you can store all your music to iCloud with easy steps.

If you use Windows, you can download iCloud for Windows app. After the setup, you can save music to the iCloud folder and it will automatically sync to iCloud.

To make things quick, it is recommended to use a professional software IOTransfer to quickly export all your music from iPhone to iCloud folder. Once you get the iCloud for Windows installed and set up, you can follow the steps below to backup all your music on iPhone to iCloud.

Step 1. Free download and install IOTransfer. Connect your iPhone to this PC via lightning cable. If your USB cable is not by your side, you can use the AirTrans feature to export music wirelessly.

Step 2. When your iOS device is detected by IOTransfer, click Manage and select Music.

Step 3. Select All Music or select some of them that you want to backup to iCloud. As you can see, there is an option for selecting all music items.

Step 4. Click Export and select the iCloud folder to start the transfer.

In a short while, all the music is exported to the iCloud folder on your computer and it will automatically sync to iCloud drive. This is the best way to backup all your music on iPhone to iCloud. If you only backup your music to iCloud from iPhone, there is a workaround.

If you only need to transfer one or two songs to iCloud, then this method is for you because it can only do it one song at a time. As mentioned, there is no direct way. You can use Garage Band to work this around.

If you know how to use Garage Band to create ringtone on iPhone, then this is similar to you. Basically, you can just import the music to Garage Band and then export as a song to iCloud.

As you know, the maximum ringtone length for a ringtone is 40 seconds. Because you are about to import the whole song, you need to set the Songs Sections to Automatic.

After you select the song from your Music Library, you can export it as a song and then select Open in another app > Save to Files. Then you can select a folder in iCloud to save the music.

After you save the music to iCloud, you can open the Files app to view all the music saved on iCloud. You can also tap to play one song at a time within the Files app.

You may know that there are a few cloud music player that can play all music from OneDrive, Google Drive, or Dropbox. However, Apple does not give iCloud access to other third party apps. If you want to play all the music saved in iCloud like a playlist, it is also doable.

To do that, you can free download the Shortcuts app from AppStore. Shortcuts app has iCloud access because it is developed (acquired) by Apple itself. Let me show you how it works.

Step 1. Get this iCloud Music Player shortcut by opening this link in Safari.

Step 2. Open this shortcut to edit it. Modify the File Path to where you saved the music files. You can also toggle on the option Show Document Picker, so you can pick a few songs to play when you run this shortcut.

Step 3. Run this shortcut by tapping the play button. Then you can play order.

As you can see, you can also set up a music sleep timer on iPhone if needed.

That’s it. You can use these two methods to backup music to iCloud from iPhone or PC. Obviously, using PC is more convenient. If you have any problem, let me know in the comments. 

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