YouTube Music can now be used as media player for locally stored audio files on phone

Google recently launched YouTube Music in India along with YouTube Premium. The Mountain View based tech giant is looking to eventually replace the Google Play Music with the YouTube Music app. Taking the first step towards its objective, Google has now allowed users to play locally stored audio files via file managers. The new ability was delivered to the app via the 3.07.52 update. Post the update, users will be able to play an audio file by picking YouTube Music as an app to open the files from the file managers.

The ability to play local music files directly would still be available via the Google Play Music app. YouTube Music can play files with all the popular extensions including MP3, Ogg, FLAC, and WAV. YouTube Music also picks up and plays locally stored audio files that were previously played using Google Play Music app. This feature was spotted in version 3.03, by 9to5Google, apart from Android Auto integration. However, it wasn't working for everyone, which means YouTube may have refined it in the most recent updates.