Streaming music

[marurun]

I have noticed that Apple Music streams in pretty good quality. If there isn't enough bandwidth it just quits.

[REPO Man]

And with YouTube you can set it to play each video at the highest possible resolution. And with YouTube Premium there's no ads and you can listen to music even with the app in the background or when the screen is off.

I think the only time the quality dips is with obscure stuff (like AOR tracks from insanely obscure bands or soundtracks) that was ripped from low-quality sources and/or uploaded long before higher quality uploads were a thing. And even then, more often than not it's more or less on par with something digitized from an old vinyl record.

[opa]

Why pay for youtube when you can just download the videos with command-line utilities?

[marurun]

Paid YouTube is such a scam. WAY too expensive for what it is.

[REPO Man]

Considering how YouTube recently taken a swing at folks using ad blockers and how I can download videos and block ads in-app, how could I not? It's definitely been a better investment than Amazon Music Unlimited.

[Ziggy]

That's just it. They are not investments. You are paying monthly to rent music. Same as streaming services for movies and TV shows. They can add and remove features and content as much as they want, and happily auto charge you for it each month.

[opa]

^Preach.

"Investment" implies you're getting a financial return.

Learn to use yt-dlp, repo, and save money.

[Anapan]

If you dislike command-line stuff as I do, and also repeatedly downloading updates manually, check out Open Youtube Downloader GUI.
https://github.com/StefanLobbenmeier/youtube-dl-gui
It keeps it up to date, allows simple conversion to audio etc, and doesn't make you type.
You can even add authentication keys from your cookies easily to get stuff from your paid streaming subscription sites - the YT-DLP supported sites list is pretty big.

edit: What I meant by higher quality is only what the source material for the youtube upload was before being re-encoded into a video and uploaded to youtube. Unless it's an official upload from the artist's media team, it's just as likely to be an old-ass Fraunhofer-type 128kb/s MP3 from 1996 re-encoded again into a video of a low-res picture of the album art and uploaded as a 1080p video. The official streaming sites are at least re-encoding from lossless master files.

[Ziggy]

edit: @Ziggy Your mixtape is still in the parent's SUV, and when a screeching millennial autotuned banshee or a horribly annoying commercial with chainsaw noises or bad voice actor in the background comes on, I can just ask if "Ziggy's tape's still there", and the music is agreeable to us all.

That's awesome!

I have other mixed tapes, if they ever get bored with that one. Tapes are easy to dub.

[Anapan]

That's awesome!
I have other mixed tapes, if they ever get bored with that one. Tapes are easy to dub.

Great idea! If you're willing, I'll commission volume 2.
Check PM.