YouTube Music Now Syncs ‘Now Playing’ Queue Across Devices

YouTube Music has quietly introduced a new feature that makes the service more convenient to use across multiple devices. Indeed, the app has started syncing your playing queue across devices, though the experience seems to be inconsistent at the moment.

9to5Google wrote about the new feature earlier this week and shared screenshots of the mobile app showing the last played song on the miniplayer. When the last played song was streamed from the web, “From your browser” briefly replaces the artist name before starting playback.

I’m not seeing this yet in my own experience: I can start a music track on mobile, and it will show up on the miniplayer on the web, but it doesn’t work the other way around. Moreover, I can’t resume the track in the same spot on the web; it just starts over.

Podcasts are a different story, though. I can start playback on mobile and resume it exactly where I was on the web, and vice versa. I’m not sure why I have a different experience with music tracks at the moment, but your mileage may vary.

YouTube Music still has no equivalent for the handy Spotify Connect feature, which lets users control the playback of music and podcasts across different devices in real time. This is probably the feature I’m missing the most after switching from Spotify to YouTube Music a couple of years ago. However, YouTube Music has many other advantages, including the ability to create playlists that mix licensed songs, YouTube videos, and your own uploaded MP3s.