Google are continuing to add new features to YouTube Music in a bid to get everyone to switch to it. Today’s main new feature is the ability to transition seamlessly from video to audio and vice versa without any interruptions.
YouTube Premium and YouTube Music Premium Subscribers can now use the button at the top of the app to select either song or video and have the song switch from one to the other. Once you start listening to a song a video and a song button appears at the top and a tap on one switches over to the other option.
Google have time-matched over five million music videos to their audio tracks and will show the video button when there is a video available for a particular song.
After testing it our on my LTE connection it was not what I would call seamless but there was a slight lag as it loaded the video or audio for that song. It wasn’t a long period of time but the song did pause while it switched — albeit for a small fraction of a second.
Google have also removed the extra audio etc that is often added to a music video compared to the audio version — for example a long introduction. Switching from the video to the audio removes the introduction and other extraneous noise added to film clips.
There is also the option to stick to audio only and never play a video but I’m not sure why anyone would want that option — use Play Music with a lot more functionality if you like only audio.
It’s good to see more functionality being added to You Tube Music but for me until there is feature parity (and a way to export playlists and history across) with Google Play Music I won’t be making the permanent switch any time soon. How about you? Have you made the switch?
Google love killing great apps & then wasting resources on ones like this that people don’t want when they already have a better alternative.
Youtube music so poor with features that if they decide to kill play music, I would switch to Spotify. I will never use YouTube music in its current form.
Interesting regarding them cutting the intro etc to videos. What about mid-song segues? Do they get cut too? I can’t think of an example off the time of my head. Telephone, perhaps?
Nope, haven’t switched. Still using Play Music and happy with it. I want to listen to music not watch it!
Same here Phill.