One of my hobbies is making playlists; usually game music or character anthems. I may go into more detail about that later, but the point is, when YouTube started locking up if it detected an adblocker, I despaired over ever being able to make another playlist. Oh, sure—I could jockey the tracks I already had around a bit, put them in a different order, pretend like that was good enough—but I wouldn't ever be able to listen to the end result and think of anything except how I couldn't get back onto YouTube.
First, what do I mean "make a playlist"? Like a YouTube playlist? Not exactly. I would actually record the songs into Audacity so I could make MP3s of them. It was a bit of a long process, since none of my YouTube downloader extensions work anymore, so I had to do it analogue style—start Audacity recording then play the song through the stereo mix. It's the analogue loophole, you see: no matter how much DRM or adblock killing you do, eventually the audio needs to go out the speakers. On a computer, it has to be parsed through the sound chipset, which is where the stereo mix intercepts it and sends it to Audacity instead, where I'm holding up a virtual microphone, recording the audio back into the computer. Anyone can do this, it doesn't take a genius. In fact, the Audacity Wiki has a concise how-to guide on that subject if you're interested.
Anyway, just as I thought I would never be able to make another playlist ever again, fate would drop 2 websites into my lap: Zophar's Domain and Newpipe. I've been recommending Zophar's for emulators for about 10 years, but I never knew about the Music pages. Using specialised tools, people record videogame music directly off the ROM without having to load the rest of the game. Nearly 85% of the world's videogame music can be found there, along with the same tools used to rip the music in the first place, allowing people to fill in the gaps where necessary.
Newpipe does for YouTube what D-Fend Reloaded does for DOSbox; it's a frontend that adds features and subtracts a few. For instance, it adds the ability to download entire videos or just their audio tracks, while it subtracts the adblock killing and cross-platform tracking behaviour of vanilla YouTube. If you run any version of Android, I would certainly encourage you to seek out NewPipe.net and download their app. Obviously, it's not available on the Play Store; Google would hunt the developers for sport inside a week. You do need to download it from their website and install it manually. It's no more difficult than running an EXE on Windows, and it's a lot safer than what you could find on the Play Store anyway.
I said "2 websites", I meant 3, except that I already knew about the third one. The Internet Archive has a new collection called "High-Fidelity Emporium and Orchestrion", which contains quite a few soundtracks from games, television, and film. It also has a number of out-of-print albums from charting bands of the '70s and '80s, which is good news for me, making character anthems playlists. Between this and Newpipe, I don't have anything to worry about in the playlist-making department, ever, ever again.
TL;DR, the official YouTube get-arounders are...
Zophar's Domain for videogame music,
Newpipe for ad-free, fast YouTube downloading on Android only,
and the Internet Archive for whole albums.
--11 October 2023--