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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tried SSH'ing into a Linux machine with the same user that was also running a the gpg-agent daemon. I tried to decrypt a file with the basic "gpg -d ~/filename". This output info about the file and then just hung. No password prompt at all. If you do this via a GUI term on the same machine you get a pop-up box with a password prompt. Seems like the gpg-agent is taking this request, and not presenting anything back to the same user SSH'ed into the machine. Had to find a way around this.
I finally found some posts on the net with people having the exact same problem. The gpg pinentry mode "loopback" fakes a pinentry by using inquiries back to the caller to ask for a passphrase. Buy doing this with the command "gpg -d --pinentry-mode=loopback ~/filename". This will get you back your password prompt, and allow you to decode the file remotely over SSH.
