A great way to bond with your friends and family is to listen to music together, but that can be difficult when you’re not in the same room. Spotify and other apps offer limited methods for doing this, but most of these platforms put a price on social listening. You can easily avoid this by playing music on Discord.
Discord contains many different automations called bots that perform various tasks that make servers more efficient and fun to use. A bot, Groovy, plays music through voice channels on Discord servers. With Groovy, you can play free music on Discord in just a few steps.
With Groovy, you can listen to any song, ad-free, as long as it’s on YouTube or Soundcloud. However, Groovy isn’t just for music. You can also use it to listen to the audio of YouTube videos as if they were podcasts.
Everyone knows that YouTube videos stop playing once you exit the app if you’re on a mobile device, making it difficult to have them in the background while you’re doing something else. However, you can get around this by joining a Discord voice channel and using Groovy to play the YouTube video just like you would a song. Now, you can still listen while switching to other apps or putting your phone to sleep.
In this article, I’m going to show you:
- How to set up Groovy on your Discord server
- How to use Groovy to play your favorite YouTube songs and videos.
To add a bot to a Discord server, you must have an administrator role on that server. People who have an administrator role on a server can create and delete channels, invite bots to the server, and make other changes on a server that a normal user cannot.
There are two ways to get an administrator role on a server:
- Asking someone what yes you have an administrator role to grant you administrator permissions
- Creating your own new server
If you create your own server, you will automatically be the administrator of that server. If you are setting up a Discord server for the first time, we have a comprehensive guide on how to get started.
Before adding Groovy, you need to create several channels that will speed up the music playback process: a text channel to write bot commands and a voice channel to listen to music (feel free to skip this step if your server already has these channels).
To create a new channel, press the plus + button on the left sidebar, enter a name for your channel, choose whether you want it to be a text or voice channel, and choose whether you want it to be public or private – this controls whether all on their server they have access to the channel or only some members.
Once you’ve set up your channels, you’re ready to add Groovy to your server!
To invite Groovy, go to bot website and click “Add to discord”. Then select the server you would like to add the bot to, and you should see that Groovy is now one of the members of the server.
To start using Groovy, log into one of your server’s voice channels by clicking on the channel’s name. Make anyone you want to listen to music with do the same. Then in your text channel for bot commands, type /play, hit the TAB and then write the name of the song you want to play.
For example, if you wanted to play Castaways from The Backyardigans, you would type /play to take TABand then write castaways the backyardigans. Keep writing /play, TAB, [name of song] to keep adding songs to your queue.
Groovy works by taking audio from pre-existing YouTube videos that match your search term. Therefore, when you search for Castaways the Backyardigans, you will hear the audio of the main video output if you searched for “Castaways the Backyardigans” on YouTube.
You can also queue a song using the song’s URL by typing /play, pressing the TAB button and then typing the URL.
If you paste a URL from YouTube or Soundcloud, Groovy will play the audio from the YouTube video or Soundcloud file that you linked. If you paste a URL from a music streaming service, Groovy will find a YouTube video whose audio matches that of the URL you pasted and will play the audio from that video for you.
If you have prepared a playlist on YouTube or your favorite music streaming site, you can queue the entire playlist by typing /play, hitting the TAB and then entering the link to the playlist.
When you’re done listening to music on Discord, you can tell Groovy to leave the voice channel by typing /disconnect on a text channel. Once the bot has logged out, you can exit the voice channel and continue with the rest of the day.
There are – more commands than /play Y /disconnect that you can use to personalize your listening experience. They can be found on the Groovy bot website. here. Here are some useful commands:
- /jump – skip a song
- /pause – pause music
- / unpause – to resume music
One limitation of Groovy is that any song you want to play must be on YouTube or Soundcloud. If you want to listen to something that is not on either site yet, you will have to upload it to YouTube. Make sure you don’t upload music that you don’t have the rights to, otherwise YouTube may remove it. With Kapwing, it is possible to upload a song to YouTube in just a few steps:
- Upload a song to Kapwing
- Create a video using the audio
- Export the video
- Post the video on YouTube
Here is a more detailed guide on how to go through the steps outlined above. Once your video is on YouTube, you can use Groovy to listen to your heart’s content.
Groovy is one of the most useful bots on Discord, and we hope this article convinced you to give it a try on your servers. If you’d like to learn more about Discord or music, check out some of our articles below:
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