The lightning bolt, which Jupiter Pluvius used to hurl at the mortals who irritated him, made its appearance in YouTube Music, chosen as an icon to symbolize intelligent – programmed downloads.
The transition from Play Music to the spin-off YouTube Music has been going on for some time, with the migration of users and their data. However, in the new Google platform there are still many things that are missing, and that the Mountain View team is providing, with very regular periodic updates. To those of recent days, which saw the carousels as protagonists, with a new navigation system, another has just been added.
As is known, for some time now Google has enabled the smart downloads function on YM, actually downloads scheduled to take place automatically at night, with the device that must have 40% charge and the Wi-Fi connection active (or data, if you have authorized the downloads to use it). The purpose of this feature is soon said: to always make available to the user something to listen to, even without having to consume data traffic or perhaps when you are offline.
The only limitation is that the tracks downloaded in the smart download regime, on the basis of the “previous listening history”, with relative system notification that reports the background update of the same, will remain usable for 30 days from when gone offline.
To activate this function, as you know, you need to go to the YouTube Music settings, look for the Library section and then the “Download” item: at that point, when setting the scheduled Downloads, just tell the system how many tracks to download and let it do so. The novelty announced by Big G concerns smart downloads albeit in a minimal variation form in the user interface.
Going to the Download section, next to contents such as off-line mixtapes, playlists and albums, the old tick icon in a circular background has been replaced, again in a small porthole, by the symbol of a lightning bolt: curiously, the variation in question has not yet reached the manually compiled playlists, where the old icon persists. To date, the aesthetic change related to the YouTube Music Smart Download feature has been spotted in last week’s version of the Android client, bearing the release number 5.02.50.