Best YouTube Music Tips and Tricks
1. Use lyrics to search songs
There are often times when you forget the name of the song and all you remember is a few lines of lyrics. With YouTube Music, you can search for that song by typing the lyrics. Surprisingly, this feature also works well with other languages other than English. This is definitely a lifesaver when you can’t find that song running in the head. It is undoubtedly my favorite feature of YouTube Music which no other service offers.
2. Use this Extension to get Lyrics on Web
YouTube Music app has an option to show lyrics which is something web app is missing. But you can use the extension called Lyrics (YouTube / YouTube Music) to get that feature back. Just open the link and click on the “Add to Chrome” button and click on “Add extension” in the pop-up. Now just refresh the YouTube Music page and you can see a small window at the side while playing the song. Anyhow, this also applies to YouTube when you are playing any songs.
3. Build your music taste by interacting
Google does a very good job of understanding and providing the recommendations which you may like. But you can actually speed up that process by subscribing to your favorite artists and liking the songs which you like to listen to. This gives a clear idea of your taste to YouTube Music. Anyhow, YouTube Music automatically syncs with YouTube to suggest personalized songs and playlists right from the start.
4. Use Radio to get Personalised playlists
Music streaming services are not only about providing songs and popular playlists for you. They also create personalized playlists depending on your taste which makes them even more personal. You might already know there is a playlist called ‘Your mix’ which provides you endless personalized music. Though this is quite good at understanding your taste, it may not always suit your present mood. For those times, there’s another feature called Radio. You can find that feature by playing any song which you like to listen to> three-dot menu and click on start radio. This instantly creates a personalized playlist with songs that have similarities with the current song you are playing.
5. Collaborate with others
You may already know that you can share your playlist by just clicking on the three-dot menu and “Share” to share the link of your playlist. People with the link can listen to your playlist and even the songs in the playlist will get updated when you update the Playlist. But they cannot add songs to it. Now you can make the playlist collaborative so that both of you can add songs into it. To make the playlist collaborative, open the playlist, click on the edit playlist icon and now make the Privacy option to “unlisted”, so that it will make the playlist public but only visible to the people who have the link. Now click on collaborate option beside and enable collaboration. Now you can just click the share button here to share the link to collaborate. You can still share the normal share link, people with that share link can only see at your playlist. And people with a collaboration playlist can even add songs to it.
6. Use Playlists as Alarm
With the help of the Google Clock app, you can use songs and playlists from Youtube Music. You can either choose normal playlists or even your personalized playlists. All you need to do is, open the Google clock app > set alarm > set the alarm sound and you can see the option called Youtube Music where you can select songs or playlists. My better recommendation is not to set your personalized playlists as Alarm, or else you’ll start hating your favorite songs.
7. Don’t mess up your recommendations
As YouTube Music is about getting personalized music, giving it to someone may mess up all your recommendations. It may not be a big deal but can spoil the experience of using these streaming services. You can actually lend to someone by tweaking a few settings > privacy and location > and pausing watch history and search history. By that, YouTube Music will stop recording your activities and it will not affect your recommendations. You can also improve your recommendations any time by going to YouTube Music settings > Improve your recommendations and selecting the language and favorite artists. It will reload your homepage with the selected adjustments.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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
18. Add songs to Playlist from Google Assistant
If you want to find the name of the song you are listening to, you can just ask Google Assistant ”What song is this?”. Google Assistant will start listening to the song and gives you the song name along with a bit more description. But if you are a YouTube Music user, you can directly add that song to any of your existing playlists or even create a new playlist.
19. Use YouTube Music in Google Maps
Google Maps has an in-built Music playback control which helps to control the music of your favorite music streaming service without leaving the app. Now YouTube Music users can take advantage of it. It will not be available by default, but you can set it up from the Google Maps settings. But this feature is not available for the free version of YouTube Music, you need to get a YouTube Music premium plan.
Wrapping Up
Along with them, there are many other features like lyrics, Hotlist section to show you trending music videos, clearing all downloads on a single go, option to stop playing videos to save data, etc. So what’s your favorite feature of YouTube Music? Let us know in the comments section.
