I really liked Spotify, but when they started subsidizing hate speech I left. For the last year, I keep trying different platforms and cannot find anything that works well. I am ok with spending money for no ads. I have very diverse music tastes so want to have different “stations” based on my mood. Any suggestions?
I know YouTube Music got a lot of shit from the fans of the previous service, Google Play Music, but over the last year they’ve added most features back and YTM works really well. I also get YouTube ad free, although I’ve had it so long, I don’t know if that’s still part of the deal
The reason why I can’t recommend YouTube music is that it uses audio from videos instead of playing the studio versions of the tracks. The fact that it makes me listen to those silly audio parts in music videos while I’m trying to listen to a studio release is terrible in my opinion, and I couldn’t figure out a way to hide those results from search entirely. Does anybody know if they’ve fixed this?
I don’t think this is true, I only ever get audio from videos in some community playlists, it definitely doesn’t do this for me by default. Maybe it’s a setting somewhere?
I am using Youtube Music premium - there is a setting you can enable under Playback & Restrictions called ‘Don’t play music videos’ so that you should get audio only or album versions of songs. this setting works well for me and I haven’t heard the music video instances of songs yet
I just did a bit of research and it looks like if you have a free account it will almost always play the Youtube video instead of the album version (possibly as an attempted foil for ad-blockers?).
I use YouTube Music and this (usually) isn’t a problem if you have premium. The only times I’ll get the music video audio instead of the studio track is if I’ve liked the music video on YouTube. In that instance it’ll sometimes show up in my automatically generated Playlist. For me, it’s worth it for the huge music library that YouTube Music has.
I noticed this, too. But I think it’s a matter of how the search algorithm works along with a smaller streaming library than other services. First it checks the first party audio that YT has streaming rights to. If it doesn’t find it there, then it goes to the general uploads. And that’s where you start getting the music video audio instead of the studio version.
I’ve also found it will offer me playlists uploaded by users that match my search results.
There’s an easy fix for this.
Settings > Recommendations > Show Your Liked Music From Youtube ~> uncheck
It’s not exactly the same but you can use the SponsorBlock addon to skip the non-music segments of music videos when playing in browser, and for Android there’s a fork of NewPipe that has this integrated.