Update (8/21/19 @ 10:25 AM ET): YouTube Music has been added to the list of streaming services in Waze.

Many, many people have long commutes to work. This mostly happens around metro cities where people wake up and start their drive 2 or even 3 hours before they need to be at work. Rush hour traffic can be incredibly stressful (both going to and coming from work) so listening to some music can help make that time go by faster. Last year, the navigation application Waze announced integration with Spotify, one of, if not the, most popular online streaming music services. The team behind the application has had such a positive response from the community about this feature that they have now added support for 7 new streaming services directly in the application.

Waze is owned by Google, but Google Maps and Waze take different approaches when it comes to helping the user navigate to where they want to go. Granted, Google Maps did recently announce an update that integrates music services including Spotify, Play Music, and Apple Music. However, Waze is taking this to this next level with what they are calling the Waze Audio Player. This is an in-app feature that lets them easily integrate a number of music streaming services for the user.

Announced this week, this new update shows that Waze has partnered with 7 new audio streaming services to their application. As of right now, this includes Pandora, Deezer, iHeartRadio, NPR One, Scribd, Stitcher, and TuneIn. This new announcement plus the addition of Spotify that they added last year brings Waze up to supporting a total of 8 different audio streaming services. While this feature is available right now, we do want to point out that Google is only making it available to their global Beta Community at this time.

waze audio player

For this to work, be part of the beta community and make sure you have the latest version of one of the newly supported streaming applications. Once that is done, you can then sync Waze to said 3rd-party application (which just has to be done once) and then you just have to tap the icon of the audio app in the new Waze Audio Player section to begin using it.

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Source: Waze

Update: YouTube Music

Last year, when Waze received integration with a bunch of streaming services, it was odd that YouTube Music was not included. This happened right after Google's rollout of the revamped YouTube Music. Nearly a year later, YouTube Music is finally available in Waze. It starts rolling out today and should be available soon to all 50 markets where both YouTube Music and Waze are available.

  1. Open the Waze app
  2. Tap the music note icon to select YouTube Music as your audio app, and start enjoying your audio content directly from Waze.
  3. Don’t see the music note icon? Head to Settings > Audio Player to turn on “Show Audio Player”

Note: You must be a YouTube Music subscriber to use this feature.

Source: YouTube