I was recently learning how to play a new song on the guitar. While it sounded fine - considering my skill level - when I practiced with a metronome, I struggled a lot to play along with the actual recording. With how some songs are mixed, it can be difficult to pick up the drum track. Even if there is a backing track, the lead guitar can sometimes start alone and be on its own for the first several bars.

At some point I thought: why not add a metronome track to the recording? It would provide a rock-solid rhythmic reference! There must be a way to do this, right? Audacity can do exactly that in just a few clicks.

Photo by Ylanite Koppens

Music streaming services provide us access to huge libraries, which is great! Algorithms study what we like and offer useful recommendations or let us discover something entirely new.

However, we can only access what has been officially released. Some "live in ${city.name}" DVD release that you enjoy might not be available on a streaming service. Occasionally, artists and labels end up in legal battles, and the content that was released in the '80s and '90s suddenly can't be distributed anymore. Over time, I started to notice that a playlist with my favorite music lost at least a third of the tracks I liked to listen to! That makes other sources of obtaining music relevant again.

YouTube is one of them. The quality is not fantastic due to irreversible compression, but there are so many live recordings, obscure releases, and covers that I find it worth it. As I store music on my home server, I needed a solution that wouldn't pollute it with hundreds and hundreds of packages. Yes, I'm looking at you, ffmpeg! Probably most tools that can download and process videos from YouTube depend on ffmpeg.

So if you too want to utilize yt-dlp in an isolated environment, I can offer dockerization!