The history
Back when this blog started (way back in 2002), the purpose was for me to share my findings and record helpful notes
about whatever software or hardware I was working on at the time. Just tidbits about errors I had to work around, or
configuration steps I had to follow to get some software to work. My other favorite types of pages were example pages of
commands I always found myself looking up like my popular cron or MySQL commands page. Then came AI.
The AI takeover
If anyone has used AI in recent years (I'll assume if your reading this you likely have) you know where I'm going with
this. The primary purpose of this blog is something that AI is very good a doing. When anyone wants to know a MySQL
command or cron example the just ask AI now. Need steps to setup a new software package, just ask AI. Have an error
your getting in some software or hardware your trying to use, AI likely has an answer for you. How do I know? Because
that is what I use it for and it works pretty well most of the time. Is it perfect? No. But it's good enough for me, and
likely most other people.
AI in search results
Google is including AI results on their search page by default. Websites are seeing less traffic because of this. The
type of query that people use to find this website are being served up by search engines AI results pages. No one has a
reason to come to this website anymore for the reasons they used to. AI does provides better results than searching around
on my website. Heck, my website was very likely sucked up for training the models so it's all in there anyways. Now what?
The new direction
Obviously this blog is not a priority for me anymore, as seen in the last time I posted an entry which was back in 2024.
I've been thinking about if it is worth keeping the blog going in this day in age. It costs me very little money to host.
But looking back at my last post about changing from Spotify to YouTube Music I see that that might be the future of what
the blog will be. Just me giving my opinion about the things I'm using, and trying in my tech life. No more how-to guides
or command lists anymore. I'll leave that for the AI.
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After signing up for YouTube Premium it dawned on me that it also includes YouTube Music (YTM). I had never used
YTM before, but if it had all the artists I listen to, and enough of the features I need in a music streaming
service, I could possibly replace it with my Spotify Premium account. This would be some nice monthly savings.
Preparing to live with YouTube Music for a month
I decided to try to live with YouTube Premium for 1 month vs my Spotify Premium account. First thing was to make sure
I could listen to YTM on all the devices I wanted to. For me that was the web browser, the phone, and the car. YTM had
me covered on all 3. For the car I wanted Android Auto support and Apple CarPlay was supported also. Now that I can
listen to the music anywhere I wanted, did YTM have all the music artists I listened to?
The short answer is yes. According to Spotify wrapped I'm designated as an "Adventurer" personality, which means I
seek out new music, and listen to a lot of different artists. I could not find 1 artist I cared about, that YTM did not have.
So no problems here. Time to start the move.
I had to get my playlists moved from Spotify to YouTube. There's no way these services were going to allow the transfers of playlists
between each other easily, so it was off to find a way to do this. Luckily I'm not the first person to have this problem, and
someone created a pay service to move playlists between different music services. I used Soundiiz
to move my playlists from Spotify to YouTube without much trouble. At the time of this writing it cost $4.50 for a 1
month subscription (cancel before the month is over). The playlists transferred in less than 24 hours without much issue.
There are some songs that don't quite match up between the services, but these were a very very small amount.
Using YouTube Music for a month
Spoiler, things went really well. I did not have any technical issue using YTM vs Spotify Premium. Do I miss some
Spotify features yes. Here are the things that I missed from Spotify.
- YTM does not allow you to organize your playlists in a hierarchy type structure. Seems it has been a request of many
people over the years, but YTM does not to seem care at all about us people who like to organize things. I can
live without this as I don't have a massive amount of playlists, but it would be hell for someone with a lot of playlists
to deal with this.
- I like Spotify's Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists quality better than YTM's version of the same things.
Much of this quality might be because YTM is still learning my music tastes. The YTM playlists they make for me are not
terrible, just not as good as Spotify's yet.
- The quality of the Spotify editors created playlists for different genres and topics is really good. YTM has
similar playlists, but their quality does not seem as great. Still need more eval time for this.
Did I end up switching to YTM?
Yes! I did cancel my Spotify Premium membership. The account will fall back to a free account automatically. You won't
lose any of your playlists, and if you want to switch back at anytime Spotify will take you back with open arms. I really
do think I was one of the better candidates to be able to make this switch from Spotify to YTM. For myself I don't need
Spotify podcasts or audio books. I have my own podcast app with plenty of podcasts I download for free (long live RSS!).
I also don't need all of the social Spotify features. For someone that just straight listens to music and does not need
all the frills, YTM works well enough for me. I can overlook the few things I don't like about YTM for now, to save that
extra monthly Spotify payment.
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There have been many times when I've wanted to go to a YouTube channel, and watch all the videos from
oldest to newest. I swear this used to be much easier in years past, but trying to do this recently on YouTube
is not easy at all. In fact it almost looks like YouTube is actively trying to hide how to do this. After much
searching around I found out how to do this and thought I would share it here, as opposed to being buried in
message boards on the web.
Steps to sort a YouTube channel from oldest to newest
The following works as of 12/2023. YouTube may disable this at any time.
- Go to the main YouTube channels "Home" link.
- Click the "Videos" link in the top row of links.
- Click the "Oldest" button.This is currently right under the "Videos" link.
- Open the oldest video up in a browser tab, and copy the string/characters after the "v=" in the url. This is the videos id.
- Go back to the channels main page and click the "Home" button again.
- Scroll down the page slightly, and in the "Videos" section, click the "Play All" button. This will start a playlist from latest video.
- Edit that url in the bar, and replace video id string after the "v=" with the oldest videos id you copied earlier.
- Next, at the end of the same url replace the characters/string after "&list=" with this "ULcxqQ59vzyTk".
- Then hit enter to go to the url. This should reverse the playlist starting from the current video.
Tips/Observations
- Save the url after each time you stop to start in the same place next time.
- For some reason this reversed playlist does not autoplay. I don't know why. Reach out to the email in the About section of my site if you know how to fix this.
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