Use of YouTube is not limited to watching videos only. Now YouTube has become a favourite destination for listening to music also. But when you run YouTube app on iPhone it stops playing music as soon as you close the YouTube or lock the device, as YouTube doesn’t run in the background on iPhone.

Here we will look at the different approaches to handle this problem and get YouTube music playing in the background on iPhone.-

1) Trick to Run YouTube in the Background on iPhone-

The trick here to use a  browser (Safari or Chrome) to open YouTube website and play songs from there and do NOT use YouTube app. Now minimize the browser which will stop the songs. But don’t worry just swipe up on your iPhone and open Control Center. Here you will find the button to play the song again. Click on play and your songs will be playing in the background. You can access audio controls from the Locked home screen also. However this play will stop after one song, and you will need to go to browser again for playing next song.

2) Apps for playing YouTube music –

Why to waste bandwidth in playing videos when all you need is music.
Here we are not looking for YouTube video player which can run in background, we are looking for app which plays only music from the YouTube. Main focus of these apps is on to play music and not videos. These apps can run in background when they are minimized and giving you true experience of a music player. –

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A) Yusic –

Yusic has a simple interface and it works without login into YouTube account. All you need to do is to create a playlist in Yusic and then add your favorite songs or playlists from YouTube by searching for them.

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Yusic supports search of songs as well as playlists. So you can search for a playlist and add list of songs to you local playlist in one go.

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It was very easy to create different playlists in Yusic such as for different moods like – Dance, Party, Rock, Classic etc. and add list of songs from YouTube.

Yusic saves your bandwidth by not streaming video and works purely as a music player which will work in background also. So while playing song you can continue doing other work on your iPhone.

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Yusic works without any ad and it is available for free in Apple Store.

 

B) MyMusic –

Interface of MyMusic is less intuitive, however it is easy to understand and use. MyMusic is also focused on music only streaming and does not play Videos. Interface of the app is divided into 4 segments – Popular, Search, MyMusic and Now Playing.

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In the ‘Popular’ segment you can search popular YouTube songs by country.
Search functionality supports searching for Songs and Playlists on YouTube.
‘MyMusic’ segment is the place where you will find your playlists and you can create new playlists here.

MyMusic is ad based and will show Ads at the bottom of the screen as well as full screen ad keeps popping up.

Extra feature offered by MyMusic is Recommended songs in ‘Now Playing’ segment. MyMusic is available for free in Apple Store.

 

C) Tuner –

Tuner comes with an attractive and easy to use interface. You have option of Playlist, Explore, Account and History.

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You can use Explore option to find popular videos and play it directly or add it to your playlist.

Search feature does not search for playlists, it only searches for songs. So it increases user’s efforts in adding songs to playlist.

Tuner appears as a music player but it streams Audio and Video both from YouTube, it simply hides the Video while playing a song which you can view by clicking on the Rectangular TV icon at the bottom.

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This definitely will not save much bandwidth but over all Tuner is a beautiful and useful app.

Tuner is available for free in Apple store.

D) Musix Tube –

Musix Tube will show you top Songs and Playlists once you choose your country. This feature is pretty useful as finding songs from Top Chart becomes effortless. You can add any song to your playlist from this top songs list.

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Searching is limited to only searching Songs and you can not search for playlists. This is a big limitation in Musix Tube, as you will need to add individual songs to your playlist and cannot add multiple songs at once.

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Searching allows you to find your favourite song, but somehow it was crashing the complete app when I was trying to search for any song and add it to my playlist.

Overall playing is smooth as Musix Tube. It is ad based application so you will keep getting ad at the bottom of the screen as well as at full screen popups will be shown.

E) iTuber-

iTuber offers Top Charts where you can get latest top songs from YouTube. However it does not consider your country so this will be Top Chart for the whole world and not specific to a country.

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The Files segment allows you to download music from SoundCloud. Artists and Album segment helps you in finding music of your favourite Artist or Album.

More segment of iTuber contains Playlists, Favourites and History of songs.

iTuber search gives search suggestions. Search results are grouped by categories – Artists, Albums, Concerts, Playlists and Songs.
Search feature of iTuber was most detailed and impressive of all apps.

iTuber is ad based and shows ads at the bottom as well as full screen ads. It is available for free in Apple Store.

 

F) Music Tubee –

Music Tubee welcomes you with a list of Categories with Top 100 songs listed in every category based on your current country.
Second segment is ‘Artists’ which gives you alphabetical list of singers. You can get songs listed by selecting your favorite singer.

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Music Tubee requires you to sign-in using your Google account for accessing Playlist feature.

Search feature gives real time search suggestions which makes it quite easy to use. Search results were very relevant and user can set filters to make it more meaningful. Playlist search is not supported by the application.

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You can play any song from search results, however if you try to add any song to Playlist it may give you an error if you are not logged in using Google id.

Music Tubee allows you to choose video quality for WiFi connection and for Cellular 3G/4G connection, this can help you in saving bandwidth.

Music Tubee shows ads at the bottom of screen but no full screen ad was shown.

Overall it is a good alternative YouTube music player which runs in background, however it could have been great if we had option to turn off video completely.

Music Tubee is available for free on Apple Store.

 

Final Word –

After checking all options, few YouTube alternatives which impressed with stable and smooth performance were – Yusic, iTuber and Music Tubee.
Our choice as an alternative music player for YouTube music is Yusic. It is the only app which is feature rich, plays in background, Ad free, supports playlist search, and streams only audio to your iPhone, thus saves bandwidth while playing music.