I mostly listen to music on youtube - or songs I downloaded from youtube with the glorious youtube-dl to dumb devices for listening while offline.
140%
I listen to them at 140% speed. I've been watching everything at high speed so much, 140% is my neutral speed, that's the lowest I can go without anything seeming to be artificially slow.Nowadays my speeds are:
- 140% - neutral speed - music, movies, some denser TV shows like Game of Thrones
- 180% - medium fast - most TV shows like Family Guy
- 200% - fast - podcasts, audiobooks, let's plays, conference videos, nearly everything on youtube that's not music
- 220% - very fast - some particularly slow sources like Tolarian Community College
This means I'm really limited to youtube as my only place for music, and to "unofficial" download sites as my only source for shows and movies. I tried Spotify and Amazon Prime, but they have no speed control, and that's insane in this day and age.
I guess I can watch things at 100% in cinema or when watching it with someone, but that's an exception, and it still feels artificially slow.
By the way, if you know of any source of music or streaming that has speed control, good quality, and good selection (not just in US), I'm definitely interested.
Youtube for music
The great things about youtube is that it has basically everything, it's free, and ad blockers work perfectly on it, at least on desktop. I guess they recently added some sort of subscription service for people who feel sad about using ad blockers, and I'm not philosophically opposed to that, but I didn't have any time to investigate that.
The worst thing about youtube is total lack of metadata. Also people thanking their Patreons for a minute after each song while I'm trying to listen on shuffle. And it's basically useless on the phone with no or limited connectivity.
The so-so thing about youtube is its recommendation algorithm. It's not completely useless, but it keeps suggesting stuff to me a one line python script would know not to (
if vocalist.gender == "male": return False).Their fancy subscription service solves none of the problems I have, just a problem ad blockers already solve.
Metadata
But seriously, what really annoys me is that I youtube never bothered to provide any metadata for its song.There's a plugin which tries to parse song titles with regular expressions, but it's not very good. It's sort of OK for "official" songs, but it's failing for almost every independent artist who mostly do cover songs.
So mostly for my own future reference, here's a list of artists I've been recently listening to a lot, in alphabetical order, manually extracted from my youtube watch history. I tried to categorize them into mainstream and independent artists, but it was fairly futile.
The List
- Alan Walker
- Amy Shark
- Anne-Marie
- Avicii
- Bebe Rexha
- Camila Cabello
- Cheat Codes
- Cher Lloyd
- Christina Perri
- Clean Bandit
- Colbie Caillat
- Demi Lovato
- Dua Lipa
- Hanna Cho
- Holly Henry
- Jax Jones
- Julia Westin
- Katie Melua
- Katy Perry
- Kelly Clarkson
- LadyGameLyric
- Lana Del Rey
- Lara
- Lindsey Stirling
- Little Mix
- Luciana Zogbi
- Malukah
- Miley Cyrus
- Porcelain Black
- Rachel Platten
- Sabrina Carpenter
- Sabrina
- Sara Bareilles
- ScheherazadEify
- Selena Gomez
- Tayla Mae
- Taylor Davis
- Taylor Swift
- Tessa Violet
- The Pierces
- The Veronicas
- Tiffany Alvord
- Vanessa Carlton
- Whitney Avalon
Youtube's subscription service does help with the mobile offline problem btw, you get unlimited downloads on your phone. Although if you were already downloading without Youtube Red then I'm not sure if it really helps you.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I have to say I don't understand why you would listen to GoT, Family Guy etc at 140%+ speed. The point of speeding up is to increase information intake speed, but the point of that stuff is entertainment, so idk I don't get it. Have you really gotten that used to high speed? How do you have normal irl conversations lol
Interesting post though, and I'm intrigued by your blog in general.
One music suggestion based on your list (though you've probably heard it): Ariana Grande - God is a Woman
I really like that song.
Yeah, I've heard that song as well. It's quite nice.
ReplyDeleteA lot of entertainment like especially TV is slow paced so it can be followed while highly distracted and doing something. If you turn off the distractions, it works a lot better on high speed.
And I've been told I talk very fast, but that was true long before I started doing high speed.