YouTube Music supports playing locally stored audio files on Android

Earlier this month, YouTube Music and YouTube Premium were launched in India. These two services were launched globally back in June last year. It is believed that Google Play Music could be replaced with YouTube Music later this year but there is no official confirmation regarding the same.

It is known that YouTube Music will let users stream music online. Besides this, it can also let users play the audio files that are stored locally on Android devices. But it does not support playback of in-app local media as yet.

Well, YouTube Music is available in both free and paid versions for users in India. While the latest version of this service available for users in India has the version number 3.07.52, a relatively newer version 3.07.54 was spotted by those at Android Police. But the changelog of this app is yet to be listed on Google Play Store.

We already know that Google Play Music supports playing local audio files within the app but this is not supported by YouTube Music. But it supports opening music files from file managers and play these audio files.

YouTube Music supports files in popular audio formats such as MP3, WAV, FLAC and Ogg. When playing these locally stored audio files, it will continue to play the track from where Google Play Music stopped. This was spotted by a 9to5Google report along with Android Audio integration. But it was not available for all users.

YouTube Music to play locally stored audio files

To make YouTube Music play locally stored audio files, follow these steps.

• Tap a downloaded audio file via a file manager or app
• Open it with the "Open with" prompt and choose YouTube Music from the options
• You will see a small music player along with a black overlay and YouTube Music branding
• On the first use, it will ask if you want to provide access to locally stored files
• Once you close the player, the audio playback will stop and the files will not appear in YouTube Music

But it is important to use the latest version of the app to try this feature.