It's hard to believe YouTube Music has been around for almost two years now, and that for most of that time, the service's offline offering have been so paltry compared to YouTube proper's ample offline options. Before this week, if you wanted to download songs to listen to in YouTube Music, you were at the mercy of the Offline Mixtape, a random assortment of songs based on your listening history. Offline mixtapes are clunky, often don't flow well if you listen to diverse genres, and run out quickly. Luckily, we don't have to put up with that anymore.
YouTube Music finally has save offline support for playlists and single songs. Hallelujah.
That's right, you can kiss that dreaded Offline Mixtape goodbye and make your own Offline songs mixtape. Saving videos in YouTube Music works much the same as it does in YouTube proper, though you still can't set your download quality at a per video level, just set a quality for all offline downloads. The beauty of downloading songs here in YouTube Music is that you have an option to save the audio only, cutting down their download size and just how many of them you can fit on phones with sparse storage.
You still can't kick YouTube Music to an offline only mode unless you go into airplane mode, but getting offline support that's more than a box of musical chocolates is a step in the right direction, to be sure. YouTube Music's selection still isn't as good as YouTube proper, but it's nice to see the app getting meaningful updates. It's also nice to see a YouTube app with a dark theme, because we're still waiting for the one from the new desktop UI to come to YouTube for Android.
