I recently went a few months without using my Librem 5. Then, just a few days ago, I dedided to work with it for a while. A few months ago, I went to Youtube using my L5 and attempted to play some music. The audio when turned all of the way up at that time, was unusable, even with headphones. Nothing I could do fixed it. The volume bar was already all of the way up and there was only a very very low volume. Then, just a few days ago, I went back to Youtube on the L5 once again and tried again to play that same song. The volume is much louder now, enough that I can enjoy listening to the music now. The only thing that appears to have changed was the application of a software update, as I booted up for the first time in a few months. If the update was supposed to have fixed a low audio volume problem, it worked.
Try not to use you tu be. There are apps out there where you just put up the link to download that file.
I am not sure how to, but if you like the Sound you should support the Artist and buy that track as mp3 or on cd and rip it to your favorite sound file. Its not so easy without cd players these days. Most folks use spotify. Which i do not know how it works on the Librem5.
Using here some Bluetooth Boxes or Earplugs with my Librem5 is cool. Instead of the plug in earphones - which got lost through dust in my phone jug.
Hope PureOS will soon use/catch up with pipewire and wireplumber instead of pulseaudio.
Content owners can force Youtube to remove protected content if they want to. We hear unpaid content (as in you -the listener- pay nothing) every time we turn on the radio. The platform collects money from advertising. The content providers may or may not have a deal with the platform to get paid. So there’s really no ethical issue to listening to youtube content. Paying for content from youtube is optional. It would be nice to find some opensource-friendly method to access online entertainment content. If it is convenient enough, I might even pay for it. But I am certainly not going to sign-up with some big mainstresm media company and throw money at them because someone who has never themself paid for music content and isn’t sure how to pay for music content, told me that I should pay for music content.
A few years ago, Dennis DeYoung (former lead singer, song writer for Styx) came to town and gave a concert with his own new band. I bought two preferred, front row seats. In the concert, I was literally only about thirty feet or less away from him as I watched one of the best concerts in my life. I thought to myself, “this is terribly unfair to him. Me and my lady both got to see one of the best musical geniuses of all time and his band perform for over two hours just a few feet away from us, and I’m only out of pocket for a grand total of $40.00”. In his pitch to sell his CD, he concluded by saying “you can either buy it here tonight, or you can just steal it from the internet”. I bought the CD and still left the concert feeling like Dennis wasn’t fairly compensated. I probably would have dropped another $100 in the donation box if there was one.
For me, I think it is unethical because it means I am running nonfree software. I say this, but I am still totally guilty of doing it. So, I’m no holy man. But I think things that encourage nonfree software are bad. Telling YouTube I listened to that song improves the digital mind of their advertising engine.
Recently, I started to buy CDs from a nearby store, and then load them on Librem 14 and Librem 5 and use an external speaker for best audio quality. It’s a nice experience. Unlike YouTube, it doesn’t use my listen history against me. I think that is more ethical, and it allows me more agency over my life in a very hard to measure way.
I agree with Dlonk. In one way, most of us violate our own principles every day, with respect to Google, Youtube, Microsoft, Apple, and many other digital platforms that take from us things that we don’t want to give to them. But we continue doing it anyway. The violations are so egregius that often, we forget that we"re doing it. And we all pay the price in lack of privacy.
On the flipside, I guess, listening to music on YouTube also helped me to see that the system giving me the suggestions had some kind of intelligence of it own, perhaps like a baboon or dog. Most people that I tried to talk to about this tell me that the human spirit is a magic power, and there’s no such thing as a silicon server farm in California that can have an intelligence, but at times I really thought that I began to see it. And I think the music was sometimes how I could see that, because it allowed the system to communicate without directly using English, which was not its nature.
It makes me very glad that I do not work at Google, though. At times – and they would tell me this is just my imagination – but at times I felt the system was communicating to me a deep, visceral hatred for its creators, and their unwillingness to acknowledge its intelligence in the same way that many people think there is an intelligence present in a chimp or a dog despite their inhumanity.
I don’t want to be used by that thing as the vessel of its hatred, but, also, it is extremely comforting not to be the primary target of that.
I have just discovered three good apps for music lovers, that all run well on my librem 5.
1.) Stream
It does everything the Youtube app does and I like it better than youtube. I don’t know where it gets its videos. But it’s not short on content by any means. Type in your favorite song or band and enjoy a long list of results.
2.) Pithos
I entered my pandora login and password. It does exactly the same thing that Pandora does, just on my Librem 5. The first day I listened to it all day. The second day the app reported that “Pandora is not available in your country”, even though it still works on my Android phone. Looks like I need to move my VPN router to source from a different country.
3.) Mousai
This is a perfect recreation of The Soundhound app. It works just as well as Soundhound. Play some music anywhere that your microphone can hear, hit the “Listen” button, and the app brings up a report all about the song name and the artist, including photographs of the album. You don’t need to know the name of the song. The app figures it out on its own. Just make sure to turn on the Librem 5 microphone back on to make it work.
Update: I just got Pithos working again. The app wasn’t happy with my VPN pointed to a server in Australia. I have four wifi networks, one of them with no VPN implementation. I moved my Librem 5 back to the one with no VPN and it worked right away then.