If you’re still not convinced to switch over to YouTube Music from your current Google Play Music, you might want to do so soon. While there’s still no timeline as to when they will deprecate the latter to make the former their main music app, we know that day is coming soon. While we’re still waiting for the ability to upload your own tracks to the app, they’ve started rolling out a new and much-improved interface to its Player Page.
The new user interface isn’t something groundbreaking. In fact, a lot of music streaming services probably have it. But it is an improvement over the previous player and so if you’re thinking about finally switching and sticking to the Google eco-system, this is probably the time to do so. The Player Page now has a better design and also playback controls which is sometimes all we need from a music player (aside from having a good music library of course).
YouTube Music has the unique position of being a player that can switch between just music and “listening” and watching the music video. Flipping between the two is now always visible to make it easy for you to do so. And if you like reading lyrics while listening to a song, you now have static lyrics rolling out as well. It’s still in the experimental phase though so expect some bugs and hopefully, we’ll see some improvements as we go along.
The repeat and shuffle buttons are now on the player page instead of being hidden in the sliding queue overlay. The album art and progress bar are also now centered and the bottom pull-up menu will take over your screen when pulled up. That menu, as well as the Up Next queue, and the aforementioned lyrics are now tabbed. When you tap the album art, you will now be able to see the download, share, and add songs to playlists options.
Google is rolling out this YouTube Music update over the next few weeks through a server-side switch. We’re still eagerly awaiting the upload your own songs feature and they’re hoping that when that finally arrives, people will be convinced to finally switch to Google’s soon-to-be-only-official music app.
