Music tips

Smart Home Integration

This must be quite an obvious feature as YouTube Music is a product from Google and they have good interaction with their own Google Assistant and Google Home. To link YouTube Music to your assistant, open the Google Assistant settings > Services > Music > link YouTube Music to it. Now you can ask your Assistant or Google Home smart speaker to play a song and it automatically starts playing from YouTube Music

Change the forward and backward tap duration

You must have already known that YouTube Music supports tap to forward and backward just like on YouTube. But YouTube Music also supports the feature to change the duration of it. By default, it is set to 10 seconds, but I found 5 seconds much better. Simply navigate to Settings> Double-tap to seek> select duration.

Transfer or Sync your playlists with other streaming services

If you are using Spotify, Apple Music, or any other streaming service, you can change to YouTube Music even without losing any of your current playlists. You can transfer them to YouTube Music and the best part is you can even sync them and any changes you make there will change on the YouTube Music and Vice Versa. You can archive that by using a third-party app called Soundiiz. All you need to do is log in to both the services in soundiiz and start transferring. For the detailed process, you can check this tutorial.

Get Notified about new songs from your favorite artists

If you love an artist more than the others, YouTube Music sends you notification of their new songs. This is really quite a good feature but it’s not perfect yet. For example, you cannot follow artists manually, YouTube Music decides on its own. The weird part is, the notification comes from the Google app, so you cannot just click on listen to it.

Use YouTube App on TV

YouTube Music doesn’t have a standalone application on TV, but you can open YouTube and select Music in the sidebar. You can access all your recommendations and playlists, but the UI will be a bit different. You also miss out few features like a missing explore tab, lyrics, library, etc. so that you have to search for your playlists on the homepage rather than going to the library and finding it easily. Apart from that, you can be completely fine with the YouTube app. Anyhow, I highly prefer using the Chrome Cast option if you using a TV that supports it.

Improve Audio Quality

By default, the audio quality of the YouTube Music is set to normal. If you want to improve your audio experience, you can set it to high or you can even choose always high. This takes more data, but, you can choose the audio quality for mobile data and wifi independently. You can find this option by going in to YouTube Music settings.

Pause Locations Based Recommendations

YouTube Music also suggests songs based on your location. But if you are not a fan of it or if you are living in some other place, you can toggle this option off so that YouTube Music doesn’t suggest songs based on your current location. You can find this option in YouTube Music settings > Privacy and location > and switch on the option called pause location-based recommendations.

Play songs from the Local Storage

Not many streaming apps provide the option to play songs from the local storge. This feature is so useful that you don’t need to maintain another music app on your device to play those local tracks. You can access your local storage by going to the Library section and you can choose playlists, albums, songs or artists and listen to local storage by switching to device files option from the youtube music option.

Switch playing music from phone to PC with Your Phone app

YouTube Music supports both the mobile app and web version, but there is no inbuilt way to switch songs instantly between them. But with the help of Your Phone app from Microsoft, you can actually seemly switch songs between Phone and PC. But you have to install Your Phone app on the Phone and Edge Chromium on the PC. After installing, you can switch by just selecting the share option and clicking on your Phone app. If both the devices are on the same network, it automatically opens that on the PC on the Edge browser.

Smart Download that automatically downloads and deletes songs

Smart Download is one of the awesome features that download songs and playlists automatically. Just as you expect, these are also the songs that are personalized for you. So whenever you are in a situation where the internet is not available like planes, you can just open the YouTube Music and it will have songs downloaded for you which you may like or even you may listen to a lot. It also updates the list regularly, so that it will not show you old songs. It is quite good at updating with your taste. You can access this feature by going into YouTube Music settings > Library and Downloads > and switching on the Smart Downloads option. You can also set the number of songs and enable “download over Wifi only” so that it won’t eat up your resources.