I’m a fan of symphonic metal, and something about that is telling YouTube Music that I must fucking love repetitive, soulless AI slop featuring guitar sounds.
It’s probably just time to set sail, but I do appreciate the convenience of streaming. Seeding a playlist with a single song has let me to a lot of music that would have otherwise flown under my radar, but every fucking time it plays something I haven’t heard before nowadays, it’s just more AI slop. Thumbs-downing them doesn’t seem to do shit.
Youtube Music is the only service I’m aware of that work doesn’t block (which… honestly why would they disallow Pandora, but leave Youtube?? I digress…) so that’s what I’ve been using. But I do have my phone, so I could run an alternative off of that.
The obvious answer would be YT with filters, but… I don’t actually see a way to set a filter - you just search a song and it does its thing. If I could just block every channel made after… idk, 2022, that would pretty well solve the issue… Is there a way to do that? That’d definitely be the easiest option.
Otherwise, is there better streaming service (which for me means decent selection of metal / actually categorizes its subgenres, and active ban of AI slop)?
The convenience of running this from my workstation just isn’t worth the amount of garbage flooding YouTube.
I tend to search for artists directly and the qobuz version often times has a 24 but version where the tidal version is 16 bit. Honestly there’s a lot of overlap.
When I say playlists I mean the daily playlists are better in tidal. I do really like some of the more static curation from qobuz like the taste of qobuz or quobozissime or whatever it’s called… I honestly like having access to both.
I use Roon to access both platforms at once. Roon normalizes the track volume for me. I can also do that through my blue sound node.
Qobuz does have a dark mode, at least on the mobile app.
Oh, fuck yeah. I turned on the Dark Reader extension for PC Firefox, and it fixed the non-mobile site right up. Hadn’t tried the app, but assumed it also lacked a toggle - glad to be wrong. I’d be using both pretty regularly, and that website without Dark Reader…
Not familiar with that either, but it sounds like I should be. Getting a lot of homework from you! ^_^
Oh, like a hand-picked list from the staff? Tbh I probably wouldn’t use that a ton, unless they’ve got someone on staff with my same niche interests… and I’m pretty picky. Metal in particular has a lot of… idk… howler monkey using a guitar as a bludgeoning tool to strike a snare drum… kinda music. No hate to any metal heads here, but not my cup of tea: weeding that stuff out while keeping the gems is a tall order. Seems like the kind of thing an algorithm would be able to handle, but so far I haven’t found one that can distinguish the howler monkey metal from the symphonic metal. Probably because most fans don’t give a shit about that distinction - they just like it all.
It’s sounding like I should just try both. Or first, I’ll try visiting them from my work comp tomorrow and see if either isn’t blocked - can’t access the big ones like Spotify or Pandora, but these might be flying under IT’s radar.
Thanks a ton for all your insight!!
For awareness - I acknowledge that roon is expensive… I bought a lifetime license a few years back when it was cheaper.
The filters for metal subgenres are subpar in terms of handling what you’re describing, but again, the overall curation for new metal is pretty solid. Overall I feel that qobuz helps to identify good new releases. Turned me onto immortal disfigurement and to the grave (likely more symphonic than what you like).
Best of luck finding out what works best for your use case.