Listen to YouTube Music With These Mac Apps
Google has made it harder to use YouTube as a music player over the past few years, and it’s easy to see why. A number of extensions and applications that allowed streaming music from YouTube without watching a video gradually went on the air . At the same time, Google began to promote its YouTube Music service – similar functions, only paid.
However, you still have a few alternatives that offer much more functionality than simply downloading YouTube Music in your web browser. Here’s a quick tour of our three favorite YouTube Music apps and extensions.
VOX Music Player (macOS)
Vox is a premium music player for Mac designed for those who want to play lossless music instead of compressed MP3 files. We’ll use it as a secret weapon: its ability to play music from any link, including, you guessed it, YouTube.
You don’t need to be signed into Vox Cloud or pay for the app’s premium offer to use this feature. After opening the Vox app, use the keyboard shortcut Command + U to open the text box. Just paste the YouTube link for the video you want to listen to and press Enter.
Vox will instantly start streaming audio from the YouTube link. You can repeat this process to add more YouTube tracks in turn, but it can get tedious. Instead, put all the videos you want to listen to on a YouTube playlist and copy that link to Vox to add it all in turn.
Once your queue is created, select all tracks and right click to open the context menu. Now go to the “Copy to Collection” section and select the “Create New Collection” option.
You can think of Vox Collections like playlists. Once created, they will appear on the Collections tab. Now that you’ve created a collection from your current queue, you can return to Vox and simply go to the Collections menu to start playing music or audio from YouTube without even opening the YouTube website or the YouTube Music app. You can repeat this process to create multiple collections.
Like the music player, Vox is pretty feature rich. You’ll find shortcuts in the menu bar, an equalizer, standard playback controls, and more. However, to get media control key support, you need to install the VOX Media Control Extension . This ties the VOX hard to the multimedia keys on your keyboard and headphones. Even if you are using other media applications (like iTunes), the media keys will always work for VOX.
YT Music app (macOS)
The free and open source YT Music app is as close as possible to the Spotify-like experience on Mac. Yes, it’s still a web frontend for YouTube Music, but it performs much better than the YouTube Music PWA app for Chrome.
First of all, you can use the app independently of Chrome, and it supports media keys, keyboard shortcuts, Touch Bar controls, and new track notifications. In addition, all standard YouTube Music features are present and available.
Personally, I’m a fan of the Dock icon options in the YT Music app. By right-clicking the app icon in the Dock, you can quickly play / pause music or skip to the next track. When you have media keys mapped to another app like Vox (or when a video takes over in Chrome) this little feature comes in handy.
YT Music Mini (Chrome)
If you are using Chrome to listen to YouTube Music, consider purchasing the YT Music Mini extension for a little more convenience. Instead of using the YouTube Music website to control playback, you can use this extension to play / pause, skip to the previous and next track, and adjust the volume. You can also view your turn and switch to another track and even read the lyrics of your favorite songs as they play.