The latest innovation makes it ideal for listening to music with better quality

While it may seem like the only reason YouTube Premium exists is to remove YouTube ads, this subscription actually gives you access to many benefits that aren't available in the free experience. For example, unlimited access to YouTube Music, one of the best alternatives to Spotify.

Actually, YouTube itself is an alternative to Spotify; Many people prefer to watch music videos or have them playing in the background, instead of searching for their favorite songs on another platform. The great advantage of YouTube for listening to music lies in the gigantic library of content it offers, which has been enriched with the arrival of YouTube Music. However, listening to music on YouTube is not so recommended for one simple reason: sound quality.

And most YouTube videos come with an audio codec of relatively low and variable quality; The best quality available usually has a bitrate below 160 Kbps, which is too low not only for audiophiles, but simply for music lovers who want to appreciate all its details. There are exceptions to this rule, such as videos with surround sound, but in general YouTube is not a very good platform for listening to music.

This will change with a new level of sound quality for YouTube, which the speed will increase to 256 Kbps. It's still not “lossless” quality, but it's a little closer to what we can get with a typical MP3 music file and should provide a superior experience. In fact, YouTube Music already offers 256 Kbps music quality, but it was only available in songs uploaded to the streaming platform. This way, videos can now also have this quality.

The new sound quality level of 256 Kbps will come to YouTube Premium users firstwhich can be activated as a new experimental option. Once enabled, high quality audio can be chosen in special controls for Premium users in videos.

On many occasions, these “experiments” reached all users after a trial period. So we hope that YouTube will do the same this time and bring this level of quality to everyone. Likewise, the company states that only video clips will have this option of “high quality sound”, but I'm sure many other videos would benefit from it.

In addition to this new option for sound, YouTube has confirmed that Premium users will be able to access new features, such as the ability to “skip forward” in the YouTube site player, as well as Play videos at up to 4x speed on mobile.