YouTube probably has the best catalogue of electronic music too, but since they removed the 256Kbps AAC format, we're stuck with the audibly lousy, frequency-limited 128Kbps crap. Well, it was good till it lasted.

What frequency limit do you see?

Opus is transparent at that rate. Heck it's virtually transparent at 96 kbps, and does a great job at 64 kbps.

They're probably getting mp3 streams I would imagine. Definitely not transparent at 128 kbps. I'm not sure who Youtube streams Opus to, I should look into that.

On a random electro-swing video I get the following choices in youtube-dl:

audio only DASH audio 53k , opus @ 50k, 1.01MiB

audio only DASH audio 69k , opus @ 70k, 1.34MiB

audio only DASH audio 130k , m4a_dash container, mp4a.40.2@128k, 2.63MiB

audio only DASH audio 136k , vorbis@128k, 2.59MiB

audio only DASH audio 140k , opus @160k, 2.69MiB

Seems pretty decent to me.

Yes, I'm actually quite impressed that they offer opus @160k. The real issue with Youtube is that you never know what the source was. If they're reencoding that from a 128 kbps mp3, that suddenly becomes much less impressive.

I don't even bother with youtube-dl anymore, I just use newpipe and listen on the go. YouTube's catalogue is quite unmatched.

Problem is that its content can disappear and frequently does. Most of the playlists I have made are 50% "unavailable" after a year or two.

I have used it for about the same amount of time and haven't seen any songs removed, but I guess it depends on what we're listening to.

Newpipe also has the ability to download music for offline listening as well, that's a pretty good backup plan

thanks for your comment. i didn't know about newpipe.