Top Google Play Music Tips & Tricks You May Not Know About
Google Play Music is an underrated music service that combines Spotify-style subscriptions with Pandora-style radio stations and your own music library. Even if you’ve been using it since day one , here are some great features you might be missing out on.
Identify Shazam-style songs around you
Shazam is great at knowing what song is playing through your restaurant stereo, but why download a separate app just for that when Google Play Music is already on your phone? Open it and tap the search bar. The first sentence of your search will read: “Determine what is playing.” Tap this and the app will start listening to the music playing in the room. Once it identifies the song, it will appear in the search results. From there, you can play the song, save it to your library, or add it to a playlist.
Find YouTube videos for your favorite songs
Google Play Music has one huge advantage over other music services: YouTube and in particular the optional YouTube Red subscription (more on that later) if you’re a paid Google Music subscriber.
If you want to watch the video for the song you’re listening to, it’s probably on YouTube. Google conveniently adds video links to any song that has an official video counterpart uploaded by the artist or posted on VEVO. Tap the YouTube-shaped icon in the player window in the mobile or web application and the video will start playing. When you finish watching it, you can continue watching your playlist as usual.
Set a sleep timer to automatically pause music playback
If you enjoy listening to music while you sleep, you can set a timer to automatically pause music playback after a while – presumably after you’ve fallen asleep and no longer need melodies. Open the settings section in the Google Play Music app and scroll down to Sleep Timer. You can set the timer for up to 12 hours 59 minutes. When the timer expires, your music will pause. This works even if you are streaming music to another speaker or sound system in your home.
Improve your playlists and streaming radio stations with a few quick questions
Google Play Music uses smart recommendations to create carefully curated Pandora-style playlists and radio stations . If your recommendations are not enough, go to Settings in the left menu of the mobile application. In the General section, click Improve Recommendations (or you can click this link if you are online). This will ask you a couple of questions where you can choose genres and artists that you like. Google uses machine learning to learn your musical tastes , so the basics can go a long way in getting you suggestions you really like.
Make Google forget what it thinks about your musical tastes
If Google Play Music has just thrown a ball at the suggestions of your playlists and streaming radio stations, you can take advantage of the nuclear option: erase all recommendation history. This handy feature (in the settings section of the mobile app) will make Play Music forget everything it knows about your musical tastes. All of your personal ratings, metadata, and library downloads will stay in place, but Google will start learning to give you suggestions from scratch. It might take a while to get the best deals again, but at least Google won’t continue to spend this weekend when you heard nothing but Spice Girls against you.
Reorder the queue while listening (without spoiling playlists)
Google Play Music handles playlists and radio stations in a somewhat illogical way. When you click the play button on a playlist, the application copies the entire playlist into a separate list called your queue. You can reorder your queue, or add and remove songs as you like, and the original playlist will remain as you left it. Tap the Queue icon (orange musical note icon in the image above) and you can see and reorder whatever has been added to your list.
The Play Next feature also makes it easy to add songs to your queue. For example, suppose you are in a car listening to the Travel Music playlist. If someone in the backseat wants to hear a specific song, search for it and click the three-dot menu button in the search results. Click Play Next and the song will be added to your queue after the one you are currently listening to. The app will then return to your playlist when the song ends. The concept of a queue is not entirely intuitive at first glance, but once you master it, it becomes really flexible.
Master Play Music keyboard shortcuts
Like most Google products, Play Music has a set of built-in keyboard shortcuts that you can use to control your music without touching your mouse. Some of the most useful are:
- Play / Pause: Space
- Next song: Right arrow
- Previous song: Left arrow
- Volume up: =
- Decrease volume: –
- Thumbs up: Alt + =
- Dislikes: Alt + –
- Shuffle on / off: s
- Loop repeat off / all / one: r
- Delete track: Delete
- Skip forward in the current song: Shift + Right Arrow
- Go backward in the current song: Shift + Left Arrow
- Call the search box: /
- Create a new playlist: p
- Create an automix from the current song: i
For these shortcuts to work, of course, the “Play Music” tab must have focus. This is especially useful if your keyboard’s multimedia keys don’t natively work with Play Music. Otherwise, you can use the Google Play Music extension to map the keys correctly with Chrome as follows:
- Install the Play Music extension .
- Click the three-dot menu button in Chrome.
- Go to More Tools> Extensions.
- Scroll down and click on Keyboard Shortcuts.
- Under Google Play Music, check the box next to Next Track and press the appropriate media button on your keyboard. Make sure the dropdown next to this field is set to Global.
- Repeat step 5 to “play / pause”, “previous track” and “stop playback”.
Depending on your keyboard, this process may not work completely. It’s frustrating that you only need the extension for your media keys to work as expected, but at least there is a workaround.
Get desktop notifications, add track comments and more in Google Labs
The Google Lab is a fun section of services like Gmail where you can try out experimental features that the company is developing. Play Music has several of its own. Open the “Settings” section of the “Play Music” web app and right now you will see three:
- Desktop notifications: Whenever you play a new song, a pop-up notification appears so you can see what’s going on without leaving the Music Playback tab visible.
- View Track Comments: This option gives you an additional metadata field for the songs you download, where you can add comments or notes. This is especially useful if you want to manually organize your music library .
- Chromecast Fireplace Visualizer: When you stream music to your Chromecast TVs, this replaces your regular album art with an adorable fireplace video.
The features in this section come and go, so it’s worth checking back every few months to see what Google is testing.
Don’t forget YouTube Red and YouTube Music
Google may advertise badly as a crossover between Play Music and YouTube , but it’s actually a powerful combination. Streaming services like Spotify offer a premium subscription that gives you millions of songs for one monthly fee. However, if you subscribe to Google Play Music Full Access , you also get YouTube Red without ads . This is a good deal for a subscription that many people would have paid for anyway. You can also download YouTube videos for offline viewing and play videos in the background in the YouTube mobile app.
There’s also the rarely mentioned YouTube Music. This app takes a Pandora-style approach to playing YouTube music videos . The best feature is Offline Mixtape. Every time you connect to Wi-Fi, YouTube Music automatically downloads up to hundreds of songs to your phone for you to listen to when you leave. Offline Mixtape requires a YouTube Red subscription, but again, if you already subscribe to Full Access Play Music, you’re in it. It might be more convenient if Google added this feature to the Play Music app itself, but it’s still handy since it’s a standalone service.
Google doesn’t make it easy to know all the features of its apps – in part because Google tends to do everything in two – but if you dig around a bit, there are some really powerful tools lurking beneath the surface. If you haven’t checked it in a while, or even if you have been a subscriber for years, it’s worth looking into it again.