I’ve had a Youtube Premium subscription for a while now and it’s definitely nice not having ads on videos anymore, but I mainly wanted it to check out the Youtube Music service for my music streaming needs.
I have my own music library of ripped CDs and other files, of course, but I’d been turning into one of those old farts who still listened to mainly just their old music from 20 years ago and had no clue about much outside that comfort zone. YT Music has a “Discover Mix” feature where it’ll recommend new music to you based on what tracks you’ve marked ‘liked’, and after tagging a bunch of my regular music, the recommendations so far have been pretty good and I’ve found a lot of good, newer music. It is kind of electronic-heavy though, which might be some kind of feedback loop where having tagged a bunch of a genre starts biasing what it presents, which then biases how many of them you tag as ‘liked’, which further biases what it presents… I’ll have to see if manually finding and tagging some more stuff like industrial and rock balances things out.
However, the big problem with it is the interface. It’s a web site, so of course you have to keep it open in a web browser, closing the browser stops the music, it can get choppy if the browser’s heavily loaded, etc. All the usual drawbacks of being a web app.
It’s also glitchy, though, with new glitches appearing and disappearing all the time. At one point, my ‘liked’ playlist was filled with non-music Youtube videos I’d also happened to hit ‘like’ on. Songs are often left with “ghost” pause or like/dislike buttons on their row when they’re not the selected row. Most recently, anytime I started playing a song, the usual song information and playback and volume controls at the bottom of the page would appear for a split second and then vanish, leaving no way to control it other than starting a different song from the start. I’m often left wondering “okay, what’s going to break this week…”
But right now, my biggest frustration is probably with trying to manage my collection. You have a “Library” with all of the artists, albums, and individual songs you’ve manually added to it, but when you’ve been using it the way I have, hitting ‘like’ on a bunch of tracks it recommends, most of your music is going to be in the “Your likes” playlist. After you’ve been doing this for a while, that list gets unwieldy. There’s no way to sort the list. There’s no way to filter or search just a particular artist or album or song name. Scrolling through the list takes forever as it regularly pauses for 4 or 5 seconds to load the next chunk of songs. You can’t even invert the order of the list, so the songs you liked early on are buried deeply in it. You can click on the controls at the bottom to pop up the album art for the current song, but closing the art puts you at the top of the list of songs, not where you left off, so now you have to scroll back and scroll and scroll… You can’t add the songs to your main library from this list individually, let alone in bulk; you have to go to the three-dot menu, select Go To Album/Artist which takes you to a new page, and then add them from there. (Update: They did change this so the artist of a song you mark as ‘liked’ is automatically added to your library, but I’m not sure I want all of them in there either.) You can make playlists, but there’s a complete lack of “smart playlists” that would let me play my overall favourites by playcount, songs I haven’t played recently, grouped by genre, etc., like I can do in Clementine.
I guess it would be fine if I were to put it on shuffle mode and never worry about even trying to “manage” the list, but I do get these moods for some song or cluster of songs from a few months ago and then I have to dig through the list and it’s just awful.
Man, now I miss WinAmp…
To end on a positive note, here’s a few of the songs I’ve discovered through YT Music: