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> However, I was bombarded with ads for NordVPN and their crap made me so angry it pretty much sold me a paid YouTube membership. For me it was those incessant

by mvexel 7y ago

> However, I was bombarded with ads for NordVPN and their crap made me so angry it pretty much sold me a paid YouTube membership. For me it was those incessant Grammarly ads. A service, by the way, that has its own serious security and privacy concerns[0]. (I feel like YouTube Premium ($18/mo for up to 6 people) is a better deal than Spotify Premium ($15/mo for up to 6 people) for a household like mine where we listen to a lot of music and use YouTube a lot. I don't know how YouTube compares to Spotify when it comes to music selection however.) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16315684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16315684

apecat 7y ago
Yeah, Grammarly is creepy as hell. I've explicitly banned it (and similar services) at work. As for Youtube music, yup, that's undeniably a good deal. The music services should watch out, especially in younger demographics (I'm already 30+, Spotify premium user since 2009). Apple will probably push Music even harder and bundle that with their new video streaming. Spotify's really trying to become the defacto podcast service, which sucks in its own right (unlike Apple Podcasts, no user facing RSS support for indie premium content etc. Podcasting is the last free rich medium on the internet, largely thanks to Apple). As for music, I'm too deep in the Spotify ecosystem myself, with stuff like proper Last.fm integration, recommendations and consistent audio quality. I can't really enjoy music with that mushy sound typical for content that has been lossy-lossy transcoded tons of times. Of course, I have to deal with that for all the awesome live takes[1] available on Youtube, and there I'm of course just grateful they exist. Spotify's audio didn't use to be all that great, except with the normalization turned off. Now with their 'quiet' normalization option, that doesn't compress quiet tracks (a clear edge over Apple Music), it's starting to sound transparent to me, as -q 9 encoded (~320 kbps) Vorbis should. Youtube doesn't allow disabling of normalization at all, and it's not super clear to me when tracks are clean encodes sourced from the proper music distribution ecosystem that stocks Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal et al. 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4V66UP4aDs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4V66UP4aDs
- mvexel 7y ago
  Really helpful guidance on the audio quality considerations, thank you!
- Godel_unicode 7y ago
  > ...it's not super clear to me when tracks are clean encodes sourced from the proper music distribution ecosystem... Isn't that kind of the point? If you can't tell which is which without a visual cue (aka bias-generator) then they sound the same.
  - apecat 7y ago
    Yes! Which is why you won't hear me waste a whole lot of breath yammering about lossy compression. I'd sure pay Spotify extra for lossless, because I'm weird in ways I'll reveal below, but I agree that people should give lossy compression a break. Well-encoded AAC and Vorbis averaging over 256 kbps are very transparent-sounding, in ways that never was possible with mp3. If I put in time, I get 5/6 right in this famous test from NPR's website[1], just because mp3 is awful and ancient. But I double dare anyone to blind test Opus as low as ~128 and ~160 kbps and working upwards, with decent gear. Having grown up with shitty mp3s, it feels like magically good. And it's free software. Even lossy-lossy transcoded AAC and Opus, which Youtube uses for a lot of stuff, sounds shockingly fine, most of the time, on most equipment, if the original copy was ok to begin with. All this is mostly passable, especially as background music. That is, until you run into special circumstances, like listening attentively with halfway-decent equipment. Spotify's default normalization mode sometimes can adds dynamic compression, which sounds bad in itself. But this can make artifacts stand out in ways shouldn't (thank god for the 'quiet' setting, added sometime in 2018). This is especially true with poor source material, for example the stupidly bright 90s Led Zeppelin remasters, which still float around on tons of curated Spotify playlists, despite being superseded by really good releases. So what I'm trying to say is that I want to maintain a music library I can pull up on any device and expect consistently good quality during playback. Take my little hobby I discussed here as an example (that is, me and my friends independently inventing the Japanese audiophile parlor/café concept) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20583900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20583900 Just because I can't hear a guitar riff getting slightly distorted or hi-hats smeared when I listen at work, doesn't mean I won't hear it with in an acoustically outstanding room with 5k worth of audio gear. This problem is very pronounced with Youtube material when there's a poor supply chain, so I won't add a bunch of random garbage from Youtube in a playlist on the tram and expect to actually enjoy it later as I'm leaning back in a proper listening room. Spotify, on the other hand is relatively close to providing a universally sane way to access music on any device. 1 - https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/...
JadoJodo 7y ago
I'm torn for this reason: I want to avoid ads, but I don't want to give Google any more money. It's unfortunate that YouTube is really the only one of it's kind. For the moment, I get around this conundrum using a combination of uBlock Origin[0] (Firefox) and NewPipe[1] on Android. Not 100% sure what I'll do about the latter when I switch to iOS. [0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock [1] https://newpipe.schabi.org/ https://newpipe.schabi.org/
- TaylorAlexander 7y ago
  I’m on iOS and I just deal with the ads. There’s a lot and I guess it would be more annoying if you were used to no ads, but it’s manageable. I’d pay for a video service if the company didn’t track me, but I’m resistant to paying for services and also being tracked.
  - Godel_unicode 7y ago
    Do you think they would get more money by monetizing you with a credit card than they do by monetizing with ads? I hear this argument that people don't want to pay with money as opposed to attention, and I always feel the opposite.
    - TaylorAlexander 7y ago
      I feel like I would love to pay for a video service that didn’t support surveillance and mass data collection. Or that provided user transparency on what they did track (obviously some level of user tracking can improve a service meaningfully). That said, I don’t for example pay for Vimeo so I suppose there are network effects. I’m on YouTube because everyone else is. That said I regularly publish YouTube videos but have not enabled monetization. Not all youtubers can afford to do that but it’s a small thing I can to do help.
- Godel_unicode 7y ago
  I'm curious what your thought process was on this. It sounds like you're saying you want to use their service but you don't want to pay for it. Is this a moral argument for you, then?
branon 7y ago
I realize this is probably not the point of the preceding two comments, but does nobody here use an ad blocker? uBlock Origin is great, or NewPipe for YouTube specifically.

by mvexel 7y ago

apecat 7y ago

Yeah, Grammarly is creepy as hell. I've explicitly banned it (and similar services) at work. As for Youtube music, yup, that's undeniably a good deal. The music services should watch out, especially in younger demographics (I'm already 30+, Spotify premium user since 2009). Apple will probably push Music even harder and bundle that with their new video streaming. Spotify's really trying to become the defacto podcast service, which sucks in its own right (unlike Apple Podcasts, no user facing RSS support for indie premium content etc. Podcasting is the last free rich medium on the internet, largely thanks to Apple). As for music, I'm too deep in the Spotify ecosystem myself, with stuff like proper Last.fm integration, recommendations and consistent audio quality. I can't really enjoy music with that mushy sound typical for content that has been lossy-lossy transcoded tons of times. Of course, I have to deal with that for all the awesome live takes[1] available on Youtube, and there I'm of course just grateful they exist. Spotify's audio didn't use to be all that great, except with the normalization turned off. Now with their 'quiet' normalization option, that doesn't compress quiet tracks (a clear edge over Apple Music), it's starting to sound transparent to me, as -q 9 encoded (~320 kbps) Vorbis should. Youtube doesn't allow disabling of normalization at all, and it's not super clear to me when tracks are clean encodes sourced from the proper music distribution ecosystem that stocks Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal et al. 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4V66UP4aDs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4V66UP4aDs

mvexel 7y ago
Really helpful guidance on the audio quality considerations, thank you!
Godel_unicode 7y ago
> ...it's not super clear to me when tracks are clean encodes sourced from the proper music distribution ecosystem... Isn't that kind of the point? If you can't tell which is which without a visual cue (aka bias-generator) then they sound the same.
- apecat 7y ago
  Yes! Which is why you won't hear me waste a whole lot of breath yammering about lossy compression. I'd sure pay Spotify extra for lossless, because I'm weird in ways I'll reveal below, but I agree that people should give lossy compression a break. Well-encoded AAC and Vorbis averaging over 256 kbps are very transparent-sounding, in ways that never was possible with mp3. If I put in time, I get 5/6 right in this famous test from NPR's website[1], just because mp3 is awful and ancient. But I double dare anyone to blind test Opus as low as ~128 and ~160 kbps and working upwards, with decent gear. Having grown up with shitty mp3s, it feels like magically good. And it's free software. Even lossy-lossy transcoded AAC and Opus, which Youtube uses for a lot of stuff, sounds shockingly fine, most of the time, on most equipment, if the original copy was ok to begin with. All this is mostly passable, especially as background music. That is, until you run into special circumstances, like listening attentively with halfway-decent equipment. Spotify's default normalization mode sometimes can adds dynamic compression, which sounds bad in itself. But this can make artifacts stand out in ways shouldn't (thank god for the 'quiet' setting, added sometime in 2018). This is especially true with poor source material, for example the stupidly bright 90s Led Zeppelin remasters, which still float around on tons of curated Spotify playlists, despite being superseded by really good releases. So what I'm trying to say is that I want to maintain a music library I can pull up on any device and expect consistently good quality during playback. Take my little hobby I discussed here as an example (that is, me and my friends independently inventing the Japanese audiophile parlor/café concept) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20583900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20583900 Just because I can't hear a guitar riff getting slightly distorted or hi-hats smeared when I listen at work, doesn't mean I won't hear it with in an acoustically outstanding room with 5k worth of audio gear. This problem is very pronounced with Youtube material when there's a poor supply chain, so I won't add a bunch of random garbage from Youtube in a playlist on the tram and expect to actually enjoy it later as I'm leaning back in a proper listening room. Spotify, on the other hand is relatively close to providing a universally sane way to access music on any device. 1 - https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/...

JadoJodo 7y ago

I'm torn for this reason: I want to avoid ads, but I don't want to give Google any more money. It's unfortunate that YouTube is really the only one of it's kind. For the moment, I get around this conundrum using a combination of uBlock Origin[0] (Firefox) and NewPipe[1] on Android. Not 100% sure what I'll do about the latter when I switch to iOS. [0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock [1] https://newpipe.schabi.org/ https://newpipe.schabi.org/

TaylorAlexander 7y ago
I’m on iOS and I just deal with the ads. There’s a lot and I guess it would be more annoying if you were used to no ads, but it’s manageable. I’d pay for a video service if the company didn’t track me, but I’m resistant to paying for services and also being tracked.
- Godel_unicode 7y ago
  Do you think they would get more money by monetizing you with a credit card than they do by monetizing with ads? I hear this argument that people don't want to pay with money as opposed to attention, and I always feel the opposite.
  - TaylorAlexander 7y ago
    I feel like I would love to pay for a video service that didn’t support surveillance and mass data collection. Or that provided user transparency on what they did track (obviously some level of user tracking can improve a service meaningfully). That said, I don’t for example pay for Vimeo so I suppose there are network effects. I’m on YouTube because everyone else is. That said I regularly publish YouTube videos but have not enabled monetization. Not all youtubers can afford to do that but it’s a small thing I can to do help.
Godel_unicode 7y ago
I'm curious what your thought process was on this. It sounds like you're saying you want to use their service but you don't want to pay for it. Is this a moral argument for you, then?

branon 7y ago

I realize this is probably not the point of the preceding two comments, but does nobody here use an ad blocker? uBlock Origin is great, or NewPipe for YouTube specifically.