With many music players shifting and leaning more towards users acquiring music and other audio files directly from the internet, Google seems to be making their own YouTube Music become a much more regular tool.

This is by them giving off the idea of the app to be a replacement to the Google Play Music that is used by most, if not all Android users for already downloaded files. This is since they started getting back to the drawing board last year on what YouTube Music should really be like. The app is however still lacking a lot of efficient features. You still cannot access your Google Play Music uploads directly from YouTube Music and importing playlists and libraries between the two apps is definitely not easy, impossible even for some.

With the latest updates though, YouTube Music can now play locally stored audio files but here’s the catch; only from an external source which happens to be the phone’s file manager. This might be an improvement but a slow one really. The new feature had been part of the previous v3.07.52 package and is also on the v3.07.54 update. As is their way of life, Google never cared to mention the transition in YouTube Music’s changelog.

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Image Courtesy Android Central

This was first realized after some reports of trying to test the offline playback ability that may have allegedly appeared as early as the v3.03 over a month ago or so. Probably they withheld the information on purpose or maybe they weren’t sure this would even be of importance to us. The changes with the updates are quite subtle as you can’t even access local files from inside it as you can in Google Play Music. With its latest version, however, YouTube Music appears as one of the choices to play music files from other apps such as the file manager.

The service is able to play audio files of all formats be it MP3, WAV, OGG, M4A and FLAC. Having expected it to be a cooler and total replacement to Google Play Music whose features honestly never ever seem to change, we’ll have to wait for any further updates of YouTube Music. This is all in hopes that Google will share more information about any interesting features added on to it as time goes. Everyone else is trying to expand their “ecosystems” and making them more efficient for users. Please, Google this would be a step further to you doing the same if you connected these two services wholly.