Hi @tahirmehmoodkhokhar
I am not here to discuss legalities - that’s relative and subjective.
My workflow:
Youtube is my number 1 music discovery site (I browse and listen to it massively during my free time just like I do social media and forums). The music recommendation algorithm in google (youtube) is amazing. Once you listen to a certain type of music, say from a certain region, it recommends a lot more similar genres and throws it right at your home screen every time you open youtube. Also there are various dj’s who upload their sets on youtube that gives tips on what can make a playlist, or what’s trending in their countries. Sometimes youtube curates sets and calls it “Mix”. All those are quite useful ideas in organizing my library.
I use youtube for simply listening/browsing at home. I do understand the annoying interruptions of ads but I prevent it by using google chrome with adblock - a chrome extension that stops unwanted ads on all websites. Adblock used to work 101% on youtube, but over the recent year or 2, youtube began kicking it out so it works only about 95% of the time (one ad slips thru after about afew days to a week of youtube use?)
I download the track as a local mp4 file onto my drive before using it.
Details of how to do that is available on google - i won’t share here.
The down-side to these sites is that there are too many popups/malwares/bloat/viruses you could potentially pick up if you go clicking clicking anyhow. To stop that, make sure to use google chrome with adblock (again) or have a good antivrus.
The other downside is that, some dj’s maintain that it’s “illegal” - I won’t re-discuss this as we exhausted it off-topic recently.
Audio quality is mostly acceptable by my standards but there are few cases where the audio is noticeably bad, hence the reason to be really selective by listening to the track you want with a very good quality headphone. I use Sennheiser HD25 and HD8 DJ headphones whenever on youtube selecting tracks for keeps. Never ever use sound-enhancing bluetooth headphones like the sennheiser momentum 4 wireless or speakers of a 2020 macbook pro (and above) that tends to make everything sound crisp and good to your ears.
On those tracks with bad audio, I fix the audio with a different higher quality 320kbps mp3 source I have, using iMovie and a few other re-encoder apps.
Video Quality has gone significantly higher on youtube (up to 4K, or at least most song owners have remastered and upscaled their previously 480P files onto 1080P or even 4K). I have not had a problem with video on youtube.
If a track is unavailable in your country, there’s very little you can do. If you really need it, then use VPN and hopefully your youtube site will pick up a different country? I haven’t had to do that but I think can work.
Cheers!
