In the past, I have discussed about an Android app that lets you play YouTube videos in the background, the feature that is not supported by the official YouTube app. However, when I gave the idea a second thought, I could see one major loophole in it. The thing is, if at all we are playing the video in the background which would mean we are not really interested in the video and only want to listen to the audio, what’s the point in wasting the bandwidth in streaming them? Why not just skip the video entirely? Keeping that in mind, today we’ll see two Android apps using which you can stream just the audio from your YouTube videos and save both the battery and bandwidth of your device.
1. YouTube Radio- YouTube Music Player
The YouTube Radio app is very simple to use and once you launch it after downloading it from the Play Store, you will see a black screen with a small music player at the bottom. You can straightaway start searching for songs and playlists from the Settings menu. While searching make sure you restrict your search to just the music to filter out unnecessary videos. After the app returns the result of the video you searched for, it can be sorted according to various relevancies like views, ratings and duration. Currently one can only search for individual songs and not the playlists, however you can always make one for yourself in the app. After the search results load, you can either play it directly using the in-app audio player or add it to a new or existing playlist. While listening to the streaming music, if you makeup your mind to have a look at the music video, you can long-tap on the video thumbnail and choose the option Stream with External App. If asked to choose a default app, select YouTube. The app also supports headsets and lock screen music controls. I am not sure, though, how the app manages the playlists created by the user. While using the app neither did I find any option to save the playlists I created nor did I see any provision to create an online account to sync my local profile. So if you are using the app in the future, make sure you have backed up the app including all the data before you format your phone. Other than that it’s a decent app.
2. uListen (YouTube Audio)
uListen is pretty much similar to the app we just discussed except that it adds few extra features which the developers missed out in the former. In uListen one can not only search and stream individual music videos, but can also play public YouTube videos. You could switch between songs and playlists using the three dots menu located on the top-right corner of the screen. In here as well a user can create a local playlists but unlike the previous one, the user can save the playlist to the SD card. A user who might want to compromise on audio quality just to save some bandwidth, there’s an option for that as well. One more thing I like about the app is the Notification drawer control in addition to the headset controls.
Conclusion
Overall, both are useful apps when it comes to YouTube music streaming. I personally can’t recommend one over another until I use them both for a few more days. How about you too join me in this quest and install both and see which works for you better? Let us know in the comments.
