this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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I just love watching everyone freak out about Spotify's shitty business practices while I'm casually looping YouTube videos with an adblocker.
Eh, I switched to Spotify last year (++, of course) and there’s a lot to be said in favour of the Spotify algorithm when it comes to music recommendations, as opposed to YouTube.
This. You get actual bang for your buck
Anyone who uses spotify just to listen to their own music isn't using spotify correctly.
I do. While I get your point, I mostly use it so that I don't have to maintain my own music library. But maybe I should try switching to something like Navidrome.
Have you checked out the made for you playlists? The Monday discover and Friday new music playlists have been key in how I find music the past like 10 years.
They don't really work for me. I listen to different genres, different languages. Sometimes I only like a single song from an artist. My taste is weird. I usually discover new music organically through friends, or sometimes I'll hear something playing somewhere and stuff.
To me, it seems like the Spotify algorithm has a heavy bias towards newer songs, and also towards English songs. Both of those are a minority in my playlists, but somehow that's all it recommends me.
I have gotten good recommendations from both but of course Spotify more often
Spotify algorithm pushes artists that pay them to push them to you. Get your recommendations via more organic means if you can. That means blogs, real people. Screw the spotify recommendation slop (and I say this as someone who has spotify premium.)
YouTube sound quality is poor, and 99% of your bandwidth being devoted to video is wasteful. Just use SoundCloud or something. Better yet revanced patched YT music or xmanager Spotify.
Edit: or better yet vimusic
I finally got a sub to Apple Music when I learned I get lossless by default. Yummmmmm.
I still hoard flacs, but Apple Music is dope.
Waiting for Spotify lossless to ditch flacs, I really want to like Tidal but I've had major issues every time I try and stick with it.
Spotify capping out at 192 was a nope for me hahaha. Someone on Lemmy mentioned AppMus had hi-rez lossless and regular lossless and I was like “yep done”
I don’t like iTunes though, so on my computers it’s still flac o’clock.
Spotify runs at 320kbps AAC which is totally fine quality-wise.
YouTube's sound quality is comparable to Spotify's - IIRC it's 128kbps AAC versus 160kbps MP3. Also, a static video's bitrate is around 300-400kbps, so you're not wasting that much bandwidth
YouTube supports 160kbps opus, which should be pretty much transparent to our ears. But the audio is reencoded in the uploaded video, which then gets reencoded by YT again.
These multiple lossy reencodes are probably why YouTube audio sounds worse then Spotiy. Artists upload there songs as lossless wav/flac, which the gets reencoded/compressed a single time.
Didn't know that YouTube had 160kbps audio... I checked a auto-generated upload on yt-dlp, and while it had an Opus stream, all of the audio streams were encoded at 128kbps.
Both Opus and properly-encoded AAC audio should be virtually indistinguishable from the original source, but I do believe that Opus performs slightly worse in blind ABX testing. Again, you'd barely be able to tell the difference, so sound quality is basically the same.
(As for encoding, I believe that YouTube uses the source audio if it's already encoded as AAC, which most video editors do by default, and music distributors send the same lossless source to YouTube as they do to Spotify, so I don't think re-encoding will make a difference)
For the paid tier, yes, but the free tier is locked to 160
There are some add-ons that turn off the video to avoid wasting energy.
But they still waste the bandwidth. The YouTube music either premium or revanced is still the "most economical" way.
I'm not sure if the bandwidth is wasted or not with those add-ons.
ublock origin blocks spotify ads well. I have found a lot of new artists using spotify, I avoided it for a pretty long time. When I find artists I like I usually buy their stuff on bandcamp cause i can get flacs