How involved you are with Google’s suite of services and apps might determine whether you opt for Google’s way of streaming music, Google Play Music, or one of the other competitor music streaming apps like Spotify, Tidal and so on. However, if you are of Google’s way of streaming music, then the latest version of the Google Play Music app includes a feature which might be of interest to you and especially if you often wake up with the app still playing from the night before.
The latest version of the Google Play Music app, v6.13, comes with what is essentially a timer. This means you can now set the timer for a specific duration and listen away knowing that when the time is reached, the music will automatically stop (albeit pause). This will likely be of benefit to those who listen to the app at night and would prefer the app to shut off at some point instead of playing throughout the night. Although, there are use cases for this sort of feature beyond sleep, like for those who are at the gym and have quite the extended playlist and decide 40 minutes is exactly how long they want to work out for. For those users, they can now just hit play, hit the forty minutes on the timer, work out and once the music stops, the workout is over. To access the new feature after updating, head into the settings menu and you will find the new ‘Sleep Timer’ listed under ‘General’. It is briefly worth noting that this is a timer and not a clock, so you will need to set how long in duration you want the music to play for and not the time specifically that you want the music to stop.
Speaking of the gym, a teardown of the app by Android Police also points to a few notable features which although are not live yet, are likely to be on the way. One is the inclusion of quick launching support for ‘music for fitness’ from an Android Wear smartwatch. So presumably you can just fire up a random workout playlist from your watch when at the gym. Another notable feature that seems to be in the works is extended support for the Edge functionality on Samsung’s Edge family of smartphones. The details on this are a little limited but if you own a Samsung Edge device, like the Galaxy S7 Edge, then you can expect some functionality designed for the Edge to be en route in a future update. While these features are not live yet, the Sleep (or gym) Timer is live and can be accessed now in the latest version. Chances are this will be en route to your device in the near future, although if you would like to speed up the process and test out the new feature as soon as possible, you can download and manually install v6.13 through the link below.
Download Google Play Music v6.13
