Better sync between YouTube Music on your phone and the web is here

If you’re anything like me, you bounce back and forth between your phone and your desktop throughout the day; and that includes listening to music. It’s frustrating when you have to rebuild your playlist every time you switch devices, but YouTube Music is finally making that quite a bit simpler moving forward: at least in one direction.

YouTube Music’s web app is now rolling out a new feature that allows it to sync your queue from your phone. This means that if you’re listening to a playlist on your phone and then open YouTube Music on your computer, the web app will pick up right where you left off – no more hunting for the song you were just enjoying. While not fully in-line with what Spotify does, this is definitely a helpful addition.

How it Works

The new feature is simple, but pretty effective in my testing so far. When you open YouTube Music on the web, it will check your phone to see if you have any music playing. If you do, it will load that queue into the web app, even if you’ve closed the tab or restarted your browser.

There are a couple of caveats to this that you need to keep in mind. First is that it doesn’t remember your exact playback position, so you’ll start at the beginning of the song you were listening to when you move from your phone to the desk. Maybe down the road we could see full playback sync as an option.

Second, it’s important to note that this is currently a one-way sync. Changes you make to your queue on the web won’t be reflected on your phone. Again, perhaps this is something we’ll see YouTube Music roll out in the future.

Availability

The new queue sync feature is rolling out gradually to YouTube Music users as we speak, and I was a bit surprised to see it already up and running for me. I tend to be on the later end of these server-side feature roll-outs.

If you don’t see it yet, don’t worry – it should be available soon. And upon first check, I thought it had yet to arrive for me as well. But a simple clearing of the queue on the YouTube Music web app had me up and running pretty quickly. You can do this by going to the bottom of the screen where your playback controls are, clicking the 3-dot menu button, and selecting Dismiss queue.

While I do look forward to this working in both directions in the future, this is a great step towards making the listening experience with YouTube Music a whole lot better. And I don’t think it will be long before this comes in very handy for me and likely for you as well.

VIA: 9to5 Google