For millions of internet users worldwide, YouTube is their completely free music streaming service. But if you’ve ever tried using YouTube that way, you know that the experience is far from optimal. The biggest deal breaker for me is no queues. And YouTube’s playlist feature is too basic.
The whole thing is designed for watching videos, not listening to music. But YouTube already has all the music you want to listen to (whereas SoundCloud only has a portion of it). And it’s free (unlike Apple Music or Spotify).
What if you want to continue using YouTube as your music player but want a better experience? Enter UpNext.
What is UpNext and how does it work?
UpNext is a Chrome extension that turns YouTube and SoundCloud into your own personal music players (just like Streamus is currently sick). Accessible by clicking on the extension icon once it is installed. It floats above your tabs and disappears when you’re not using it.
Like a traditional music player, it has 4 tabs – Now Playing, Search, Playlist and Chart.
The UI is black and pretty simple (like a combination of Spotify and Material Design). The currently playing song is on the left and the menus are on the right. Just click where you want and get started.
You don’t need to log in to any service through the app. Just start searching for the songs you want to play, add them to a playlist or just listen to the top charts.
While UpNext only plays audio, it downloads the entire YouTube video in the background (as it should be). So if you’re on a low bandwidth connection, don’t use UpNext.
Search and queue
I’d say, just start by searching. We all have a collection of songs that we can’t get tired of listening to. Classic works. Just search and start playing. Or click there Play next to the song name to add it to the Current Playing Queue.
Talking about Queue, you will sometimes find that it behaves very strangely. The songs are duplicated or the order is shuffled. I think it’s a design issue. Also, the queue stays that way until you manually clear it using Ventilation button at the bottom of Line up navigation.
Create and import playlists
If this is the default way to listen to music, then you really need to start creating playlists. Kinda easy. go playlists tab and enter the playlist name New list to create a new playlist.
Now, no matter where you are, when you find a song you want to add to an existing or new playlist, click the + button and select the playlist.
One really cool thing about UpNext is that you can import existing YouTube and SoundCloud playlists. This is a great way to get a playlist of “best songs” for your favorite artists and then delete the songs you don’t like.
From playlists tab, click Import at the bottom and paste in the playlist link and edit the title if you want.
Music discovery
If you are looking for new music, go to chart in UpNext. Here you’ll find popular music based on genres and even the current top 100 r/music songs.
Scrobble Go: Scrobblers will be happy to hear that UpNext supports Last.fm scrobble. Simply click finally.fm to set it up. Songs played for 30 seconds will be recorded. You can change the duration from the settings.
Keyboard Shortcuts
If you’re a keyboard expert, you’ll appreciate that UpNext supports keyboard shortcuts. The great thing is that if you own a Mac or laptop with built-in media keys, you don’t even need to configure anything. They will be set as the default for UpNext. You can change this by going to the extensions menu (here’s how).
All great keyboard shortcuts: Here are all the important keyboard shortcuts you need to know for popular services.
How do you listen to music on all your devices?
There are many options these days. Do you use a streaming service? Or something like YouTube when you’re on your PC but playing music offline on your phone? Share with us in our forum.
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
