Oliver Mitchell

YouTube Music Gets a New Button

The music-streaming application got a new feature called “Play My Station”. It was brought to replace the Offline Mixtape shortcut. However, it made the app’s interface feel cluttered.

Last summer, YouTube Music has deleted the My Mixtape shortcut from its feature palette, causing a bit of dismay among users. Compensation arrived later: now we have a Play My Station shortcut, which plays your favorite tunes immediately. 

Play My Station is located at the bottom of the app. Upon tapping, it also unfolds My Supermix — the feature, which was previously known as Your Mix. Naturally, this sandwich-like layering leads to a bit of confusion. What’s making things worse is that My Supermix also unfolds extra options like Replay and Discover. On the brighter side, you can drag the button to the home screen, creating a nifty shortcut. At the same time, it won’t let you oversee the tracklist or save the jams for later if you want to listen to them offline.

In addition to the changes, YouTube Music is also getting a Now Playing & Recently Played widget. It includes two lines: in the first line, you get to see the artist/band name, cover art, and the title of the track. The second line browses 5 songs you’ve recently enjoyed, so you can access one of them quickly. Another widget, dubbed Turntable, has also been added. It doesn’t do much, apart from putting the cover art/title duo in a circle, also browsing some recently played jams.

The design changes are a part of the Material You — a massive update that the entire Android ecosystem is going through. As the GUI is seemingly being tested yet, buttons and widgets are added/removed from time to time.

Which YouTube Music GUI version do you prefer the most? Do you like the whole Material You concept? Let us know in the comments!