summary
- YouTube Music is adding a “silence trimming” feature for podcasts, finally catching up with the soon-to-be-deprecated Google Podcasts.
- Trimming silences eliminates long pauses, making your podcast episodes shorter and more efficient for your listeners.
- YouTube Music is also working on other changes, including enabling offline playback on the web.
YouTube Music officially launched support for podcasts in its app almost a year ago. Google said at the time that a standalone Podcasts app wouldn't work, and we now know that it didn't work. The YouTube Music team is busy finalizing the in-app podcast experience ahead of the service's planned shutdown in April. With this in mind, developers are working on adding features common to the best podcast apps, including the soon-to-be-deprecated Google Podcasts.
YouTube Music still needs these key features to compete with Spotify and Apple Music
Although YouTube Music has some unique advantages, there are still some important features that are missing
Thanks to a code discovered within YouTube Music (v6.43.52) by assemble debugGoogle remove the silence Add functionality to your app. It is designed specifically for podcasts and the string looks like this – “Skip the silent parts during the episode.AssembleDebug notes that this feature does not appear even if the aforementioned version of YouTube Music is installed, suggesting that the feature may appear in the future as part of a server-side push.
Silence Trim works exactly as it sounds, removing long pauses and silences from your podcast. This has the advantage of reducing the playback time of each episode and allowing you to quickly watch your podcast. Third-party apps like PocketCast have multiple trim silence options for additional customization. It will be interesting to see what YouTube Music's version of Trim Silence will be like, and whether the media player will have a toggle to enable/disable this feature, similar to Google Podcasts.
Interestingly, Google Podcasts has supported the ability to cut silent periods during podcast episodes since 2018. So it's hard to understand why it took so long for YouTube Music to adopt this feature. But as the saying goes, it's better late than never.
Several other changes are coming to YouTube Music
To provide YouTube Music users with a seamless experience across the web and mobile apps, the platform recently launched support for offline viewing on the web. The only caveat is that the user must be connected to the Internet at least once every 30 days to maintain downloaded content.
Google hasn't officially announced this offline viewing feature for the web, but offline downloads are limited to YouTube Music Premium subscribers. However, as stated on the Google support page, downloading podcasts does not require a subscription.
