Google have YouTube, Google Play Music and now YouTube Music which can be very confusing to many users. The newest one is of course YouTube Music and when first introduced was lacking in features. Slowly Google have been adding features to it with the latest to be audio quality controls.
In Google Play Music you can control the quality of the music that you listen to whether on mobile or Wi-Fi data and while we have expected Google to bring it to YouTube Music for quite a while it has only just arrived. The music quality controls arrived on iOS a while back but a bug on Android was found near the release date and the Android release was pushed back.
Within the settings of the YouTube Music app there is now a setting to change the audio quality while on a mobile network and also one for when on Wi-Fi. The audio quality settings are low, normal, high and always high with the default being normal. As for downloads you can also change the audio and video quality of the downloaded clip.
For some with limited data allowances this will no doubt be a welcome addition to the app and hopefully lead to more using the service.
The YouTube Music team also had a AMA at their community forums where they spoke fairly candidly about YouTube Music. In doing so they revealed that at this stage they have no timeline for the merger of Play Music and YouTube Premium, instead first focusing on adding features to YouTube Music so it supports all the same features that are currently in Play Music. This will hopefully result in a seamless merger of the two services with “your library (including playlists), uploads, and history” will be merged from Google Play Music to YouTube Music.
The team also revealed that not all artists that are on Google Play Music are also available on YouTube Music but they are working with those artists to bring their music to the new service. They also revealed that in the end some music, at the discretion of the artist and their labels, will end up in YouTube Premium only, and not on the free level of YouTube — makes sense, there is no free level of Google Play Music where users have access to everything.
There was also a mention of the ability to play personal playlists in YouTube Music via Google Assistant arriving later this year. Along with the above details many more questions were answered. If you are interested head over to the Community Forum and check out all the answered questions.
Annnddrrooiidddd Auuutoooooo pleeeaaaasssseeeeee
Biggest problem is that it uses Youtube tracks from music videos.
These often have extra sound effects or rubbish to do with the video, and sometimes artists have a bit at the end “Thanks for watching my video, blah blah about upcoming stuff”.