By Raj Jayavant · Updated
On desktop, right click inside the video player and choose Loop. The video repeats continuously from the beginning. For a playlist, open the playlist panel and click Loop there.
That is the whole feature. There is no way to set a start and end point, so it repeats the entire video every time. Useful for putting a song on repeat, no use at all for the four bars you are trying to learn.
You will find advice suggesting &start= and &end= parameters on the video URL. These do work for setting where playback begins and ends, but they do not loop. When playback reaches the end point it stops, and you refresh the page to go again.
That is manual repetition with extra steps, and it breaks the thing that makes looping useful, which is not having to touch anything between repetitions.
To repeat one part you need a player that accepts two markers and returns to the first when it reaches the second. PhraseLoop does exactly that:
The section now repeats on its own. Both markers can be moved afterwards without losing your place, and you can change the playback speed while it is looping, which is the reason most people want this in the first place.
The web tool works in a mobile browser, so you can set markers and loop a section on a phone or tablet. YouTube’s own app loop, like the desktop one, still only repeats whole videos.
A useful side effect of markers living in the address bar: copying the link and sending it opens the same video at the same section for whoever receives it. That is how a teacher points a student at one specific bar rather than saying “around three minutes in”.
Looping and slowing usually go together, because the reason a passage needs repeating is that it is too fast to absorb. Playback speed goes down to a quarter of the original and the pitch is preserved, so the music stays in the same key. There is more in how to slow down a YouTube video.
Extensions exist that add section looping to YouTube itself. They work, with two trade-offs: they only run in the browser you installed them in, and they require granting an extension access to your browsing. A web page requires neither, which is the reason this one exists.