If you’ve used YouTube Music, you are probably aware of the service’s incredibly useful “Offline Mixtape” feature that automatically downloads a user-specified number of songs based on the kind of music you like and listen to the most on the service, and now, YouTube Music is improving upon this with a new feature called ‘Smart Downloads.’
A new tool called ‘smart downloads’ — when manually enabled — will automatically download 500 songs that subscribers can access regardless of their online status. The 500 algorithmically-derived songs will include the Offline Mixtape, as well as other tunes based on ‘liked’ videos and other favorited playlists and albums, according to The Verge. Downloads occur at night when a phone is connected to Wi-Fi, and users can also set a limit as to how many songs will be downloaded.
With Smart Downloads, YouTube Music will now not only create an Offline Mixtape for you based on the songs you like listening to, but it will also download songs you’ve liked, and other playlists that you frequently listen to.
You can still set the total number of songs you want YouTube Music to automatically download on your device, and the app shows a helpful approximate storage size that your Smart Downloads will take on your device. Also, if you’re worried about data usage, Smart Downloads will only download music at night, and when you’re connected to a WiFi network, so you don’t have to worry about background data usage either.
When users want more than 100 songs on their phone, YouTube Music will download your Liked songs, favourite playlists, and other frequented albums. To account for this new feature, the Downloads screen sees a slight revamp. Replacing “Offline mixtape” above is “Recent,” while other saves are arranged in alphabetical order below.
Again, you’ll need to be a YouTube Music Premium subscriber (or have one of the older, bundled, grandfathered YouTube/Play Music plans) to get this new feature. The new ‘Smart Downloads’ feature doesn’t seem to be live just yet and if you haven’t tried out offline mixtape yet, the offline mixtape is still available and makes up the first hundred songs saved by smart downloads. Like before, it will appear as “Your Mixtape” in the “Home” and “Library” feed, as well as the app shortcut. Here’s how you can enable it:
Open the YT Music app and click on your user icon on the top right.
Now click on Downloads and then the small gear icon on the top.
In the settings page enable ‘Download an offline Mixtape’
Choose the number of songs you want the service to download.
You may also want to check ‘Download over Wi-Fi only’
You can also select the Audio Quality (Low, Normal or High)
Alternatively, you can also ‘Clear Downloads’ if you realise Offline Mixtape isn’t your thing, so keep that in mind. It isn’t clear when this feature is rolling out, but given the announcements, it should be soon.
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