The redesigned YouTube Music was announced back in May of this year, creating a lot of confusion and annoyance from Google Play Music users, namely due to the lack of clear communication from Google on certain important matters. Anyhow, fast forward a few months later and the YouTube Music team now has more answers on user feedback. You can visit the Q&A page here or have all the key points summarized by us below.
In a recent update, YouTube has fully launched audio and download quality selection on both iOS and Android for YouTube Music Premium subscribers.
HQ audio (higher than 256kbps)?
Right now we don’t have any plans for audio quality higher than 256kbps. Our deals would require us to charge more to stream FLAC, so at this point we are focused on improving performance rather than supporting lossless streaming.
Missing music
We’ve heard your feedback about missing music, and we are actively reading all your feedback for albums, songs, and artists. We are continuously working to add your favorites into YouTube Music. Please continue to leave feedback in the app!
Is there a timeline to being able to filter songs in a specific playlist (search for a song in a playlist)?
The library team is working on a number of playlist improvements, including better sorting within the songs of a playlist. We don’t currently have a plan for filtering, but it’s a feature request we have heard from you.
Do you have any plans on separating YouTube playlists and subscriptions from YouTube Music?
We did separate albums & playlists from YouTube Music so they don’t show up in YouTube.com. We are now looking at allowing the users to do this for subscriptions as well.
When will gapless playback work?
It’s something the team is actively working on, but we don’t have a date on that for you at this time.
When is Google Music going to get replaced by YT Music?
Along with building new, innovative features that weren’t on Google Play Music, we are working hard to make sure we support the most important GPM features in YouTube Music (including personal uploads) before migrating users over. There is a lot of work to do, so we don’t have a specific timeline at this point.
We want to make it really easy for you to bring over your library (including playlists), uploads, and history from GPM to YTM, but we don’t have a timeline as mentioned above. Our goal is to phase the migration, so we’ll start by allowing you to migrate non-uploaded content, and then eventually support full migration including uploads.
Our plan is to have it be as simple as tapping a single button to migrate all of their GPM content over to YouTube music. A lot of the work we will be doing to make this seamless is around ensuring that we resolve duplicates and give users the library they expect even if they’ve used both apps (like I have).
Some data will be purely additive, like bringing over your playlists. Some data will be merged, like our understanding of which artists you love and your thumbs ups. To get to the heart of your question, our plan here is seamless merging, not overwriting.
Library
We have heard all your feedback regarding organization features you’d like to have when looking through your Library. We’re working on ways to improve browsing your content and building ways to make it easier to find the music you love and have saved in your library. Stay tuned for feature updates!
I really relied on the play counts on Google Play Music to tell if I listened to an album or song. Will this be coming to YouTube Music? Another option, what about badges when someone has listened to an album in it’s entirety? Or check marks. I think this would be a neat feature.
Individual user play count will be coming to YTM before the GPM migration. I do like the idea of some sort of UI that shows when you’ve listened to an album as long as it doesn’t feel too much like unread emails 🙂
Are any efforts being made to make YouTube Music more stable when using it with Chromecast and Google Assistant?
There are folks on the team actively working on making cast and assistant more stable and faster. We are always always working on improving the results in assistant queries. [Playing personal playlists via Google Assistant is] coming later this year; stay tuned!
Often when playing a song in ‘audio only’ mode the music video version of the song will play. In some cases these have dialogue or other sound effects present in the music video but not the official track. Are there any plans to address this and play the correct version?
The team is working on a really exciting overhaul of how we play audio and video in order to really show off YouTube’s amazing catalog of content. I can’t discuss much more about it, but it’s something we want to launch in the near future.
Desktop application
One new experience we launched this year was a rich desktop web player at music.youtube.com. We did get a few questions about a specific desktop app. There are no plans to build a desktop application, but we are working on adding a lot of features to make the web feel more like a desktop player including media kets (sic) support.
Android Auto
This is something we are aware of and working towards.
Source: YouTube Music Q&A Session
