Summary
- YouTube Music’s web version now remembers the last played songs and items in the queue when the app is reopened.
- However, the web player currently resets to the beginning of the episode for podcasts, which is likely a bug.
- The YouTube Music extension in Gemini went live recently, with the music streaming app also picking up the hum-to-search capability not too long ago.
Despite lagging behind music streaming juggernauts like Spotify and Apple Music, YouTube Music has come along quite nicely over the past few years. However, some of the app’s features aren’t consistent across all platforms. For example, while the Android and iOS versions of YouTube Music can pick up where you left off after closing and reopening the app — including for songs and podcasts — this functionality does not currently exist for the app’s web version. Thankfully, that appears to be changing now as part of a recent change.
YouTube Music still needs these crucial features to compete with Spotify and Apple Music
While YouTube Music offers some unique advantages, there are still several key features that it’s missing
As spotted by 9to5Google, YouTube Music on the web can now remember the last song played by the user and keep it docked to the screen while reopening the service. Moreover, the web player can now remember the songs in your Up Next queue as well, regardless of whether they’re from playlists or albums.
But unlike YouTube Music on Android, reopening the web player will reset the song to the beginning and not where you stopped previously. 9to5Google notes that this behavior also applies to podcasts, which can make things tricky, especially if you’re listening to a longer-length podcast and don’t remember where you stopped. The site speculates that this is likely a bug, so there’s hope that it could be remedied in a future update.
Unfortunately, I’m not seeing this updated web player yet, which suggests that it’s part of a limited rollout. Nevertheless, it’s a decent feature to have, particularly for individuals who predominantly access YouTube Music through the web player.
YouTube Music is seeing some key changes
YouTube Music recently added a neat hum-to-search feature for songs after being in development for a while. This feature is designed to let users easily identify a song when they only know what it sounds like but don’t know the lyrics, the artist, or the song’s name.
Meanwhile, Google Gemini finally got the long-awaited YouTube Music extension last week. This extension enables the chatbot to pull up songs from the streaming service based on your prompts/commands. This feature has been in the works for a while, too, but is finally ready for prime time. It’s worth checking out Google’s support page for some nifty examples that users can try with this new extension.
