Earlier last month, we enabled a new YouTube Music widget for Android that was first featured in Pixel 6 ads. The “Turntable” widget now appears briefly for some YouTube Music users today.
Update 10/5: The The Turntable widget is now widely available with version 4.47+ of YouTube Music following a server-side update on Android 12. It does not appear on Android 11 and earlier. During this time, the center disc / cover does not spin.
10/4 original: After installing YouTube Music version 4.48.51, “Turntable” will briefly appear next to the “Now Playing” widget, which does not appear to be currently undergoing an overhaul at this time.
The new one provides “Quick access to your most recently played tracks” and is 3 × 2 by default. You can expand it to take up the entire screen with the inner disc adjusting accordingly. This circle shows a cover art with a play / pause button in the lower left corner and I like / don’t look like at the top.
Since there are only two actions, Turntable is not very useful for reading commands. It’s quite handy for going back to a song.
In our briefing test this afternoon, the cover does not rotate when the music is playing. It also does not appear to rotate with the current playing position. It would have been very fancy, but Google’s original Material You reel is more ambitious than factual.
A rotating widget would probably have been resource hungry, but maybe that’s something planned for the future. Another difference is that “start radio” is not available from the widget.
The sideloading of version 4.48.51 will cause the new home screen item to appear in the Android 12 sheet and be usable for about a minute, however, once YouTube Music is synced, the Turntable widget is removed and it will not all you have to do is play in progress. On the bright side, a server-side update at any time could now activate it.
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