I was on the road these days and thought that I could try Youtube Music, which I have anyway thanks to the Google Play Music subscription.

Several weeks ago I synchronized my favorite playlist to the phone, so I was forced to test the offline functionality on the plane.

Music is playing - what could go wrong?

Said and done: headphones on, music on. So far so good. YT Music only plays the music of Youtube videos that were recognized as music. So if you have also favored a lecture, it is not to be heard.

Videos are not music

Basically you can’t do anything wrong with a music player - but as a user you notice that it’s Youtube. You can listen to songs which are available on Google Play Music in YT music as you do on Spotify & Co.

However, if you have started to add videos to the playlist, the audio stream contains all the stuff that can be heard in the video, eg. an intro like in many music videos or even an outro, as in this video. That’s really annoying when it comes to listening pleasure. Now you could start to maintain separate playlists, but for me playlists are like tagging - if I have a song from the 90s, I don’t want to put it into both playlists „90s Audio“ and „90s Video“.

And then of course there’s the already missing feature to upload your own music. I have so much music from the 90s and early 2000s that YT and Play Music don’t provide. Same with the other streaming services. Sometimes you can’t even buy them digitally. And that’s annoying. I even thought about switching to Amazon Music Unlimited a few months ago, but then they switched off the music upload feature.

Crashes

I recently heard that Youtube Music crashed all the time for some people. Well, for me a crash is associated with the message „Unfortunately Youtube Music has stopped“. I didn’t get this.

However, all this still doesn’t work out so well. Whenever I pressed Pause, the software quits itself after a few minutes. Maybe it drew too much energy and was killed by the system or it quits itself, because it is unused since period X. But that’s annoying.

Also, the sound likes to jerk sometimes, which I couldn’t see with Play Music in this form.

Conclusion

So as soon as Google turns Play Music off, it could be a very exciting thing for me as long as they haven’t moved all the existing features. For me, local players/playlists/MP3 files are out of the question. I want to stream it and I don’t want to run a file management system and even not my own streaming server.