YouTube Music isn’t the most feature-rich of all the music streaming services, but it is a great option for those who love music videos, user-generated content, and the YouTube ecosystem overall. If you have YouTube Music, or are considering switching from another platform, these are the best tips and tricks to get the most out of your listening experience.

Use these tools to transfer your playlists from another streaming service

If you’re moving to YouTube Music from another app, you don’t have to start from scratch. YouTube has a direct integration with Apple Music for playlist transfers. For other streaming services like Spotify, you can import using third-party apps like TuneMyMusic or Soundiiz for a fee (for a one-time transfer, you only need to subscribe for a month). To move data from Apple Music to YouTube Music, sign in to Apple Music and choose Request to transfer a copy of your data > Apple Music playlists > Continue. You’ll need to select your Google account and tap Confirm Export.

Upload your own music to your library

If YouTube Music doesn’t have something you want to listen to, or if you want to add your personal library to the platform, you can upload up to 100,000 songs from your computer. That said, there are some limitations when uploading music. Other users won’t be able to play those songs in shared playlists, and they won’t be considered for your YouTube Music recommendations. To upload your own content, either drag files to music.youtube.com on desktop or click your profile photo and select Upload music. Files must be FLAC, m4a, mp3, OGG, or WMA.

Pause your watch history to keep content from influencing your recommendations

Spotify has an “exclude from taste profile” option that allows you to keep specific tracks or playlists from influencing your personalized recommendations or appearing in your year-end Wrapped. YouTube Music’s analog isn’t as nuanced; instead, you can pause your overall watch history, which means videos won’t show in your history or be used for recommendations. Note that this setting applies across both YouTube and YouTube Music if you’re signed in with the same account. To pause your watch history, go to Settings > Privacy & location or Privacy & data and flip the toggle next to Pause watch history.

Another option is to exclude videos you’ve liked on YouTube from your YouTube Music recommendations. Go to Settings > Recommendations or Playback & Restrictions and toggle off Show your liked music from YouTube.

Improve streaming quality with EQ, playback, and normalization

For the best listening experience, you can adjust a handful of YouTube Music audio quality settings. First, go to Settings > Data saving (on Android) or Playback & restrictions (on iOS) > Audio quality on Wi-Fi and select High or Always High. You can do the same for mobile data streaming from this menu and for downloads via Settings > Background & downloads or Downloads & storage. YouTube Music listeners on Android have an equalizer, which allows you to customize bass and treble levels across nine bands or choose from music genre presets. You’ll find this under Settings > Playback > Equalizer. YouTube Music also recently introduced an audio normalization feature for consistent volume across tracks, though it doesn’t appear to be available to all users.

Save data with audio-only streaming

When listening to YouTube Music on mobile, you may not always want the data drag of videos, especially if your connection is poor. You can disable video playback with audio-only mode, which will switch music and podcasts that have video to audio-only versions. On the app, tap your profile photo and go to Settings > Data saving or Playback & Restrictions. Flip the toggles for Don’t play music videos and Don’t play podcast videos. Note that this feature is available for Premium subscribers only.

Use Smart Downloads to manage device storage space

YouTube Premium subscribers also have a mobile feature called Smart Downloads. When enabled, YouTube will automatically download recommended videos to your device for offline viewing. The setting is turned off by default, but if you enable it, you can select how much storage space you want to allot to downloaded content. Go to Settings > Background & downloads or Downloads & storage and flip the toggle next to Smart downloads. You can then set the slider to your chosen storage capacity. There’s also an option to have YouTube Music automatically download up to 20 of your recently played songs. Note that downloads will only occur when you’re connected to wifi and will pause when your device storage is low.

Use hashtags to search for playlists

One way to find relevant content on YouTube Music is to search with hashtags, which creators can add to titles and descriptions of videos and playlists. Simply type the # symbol followed by the keyword, which can be anything from an artist or genre, to #newmusic or #live. YouTube Music also allows search operators (like a standard Google search), and it has a Sound Search function that uses your microphone on mobile to identify a song being played, sung, or hummed, which you can then save to your library.

Invite collaborators to shared playlists

The most popular music streaming services all have some type of collaborative feature, from Spotify’s real-time Jams to Apple Music’s shared playlists. On YouTube Music, collaboration allows multiple users to contribute to a playlist and add songs and videos. To invite collaborators, tap the pencil icon on a playlist, tap Collaborate, toggle the Collaborate feature on, and tap Invite collaborators to share the link. Playlists must be either public or unlisted for collaboration. A more recent addition called Taste Match will automatically generate a new playlist every day based on participants’ listening history. Taste Match can include up to 10 users. In the YouTube Music app, go to the Library tab and tap New > Taste match > Invite to share the link.

Use this feature to generate playlists with AI

Also like most other music streaming platforms, YouTube Music now has an AI-powered playlist generator, which uses Google’s Gemini to translate natural language requests into custom playlists. In the Library tab, tap New > AI Playlist and enter a prompt, like “gentle rock with emotional depth” or “artists like [favorite artist].” I got decent results with these simple prompts, but some Reddit users note that more specific and detailed inputs tend to yield better outcomes.

Use these workarounds to block ads on the free tier

If you’re not paying for a premium YouTube Music subscription, your listening will contain ads. An obvious fix is to upgrade to a paid plan (though some Premium subscribers have still been served ads) or you can try a workaround. One option is to listen through Brave Browser, which blocks ads on desktop and mobile without the need for a third-party extension. I’ve also seen users frequently recommend installing an ad blocker like the open-source uBlock Origin in Firefox or DuckDuckGo.

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Though I’ve spent years evangelizing for the Boox Palma 2, a phone-sized Chinese e-reader with an open Android operating system, my allegiances have shifted in recent months. I’m now obsessed with the tiny, slightly janky, minimalist devices put out by Xteink, another Chinese tech company. And I’m far from the only one—the Xteink subreddit is a busy place.

The $69 Xteink X4 has a 4.3-inch screen and native software that’s so bad, it wasn’t really worth recommending until fans of the device cobbled together their own crowdsourced alternative. The $79 X3 (which is currently only available in the U.S. direct from Xteink) is largely the same device, but even smaller—about the size of a credit card. Either one is a great choice for portability, but they come with a lot of trade-offs, including only being able to load books without digital rights management software (DRM), which means your existing library of Kindle books is right out.

But the next device from Xteink is on the horizon—it’s called the S4, and it looks like it might just do everything I could ever ask of a micro-sized e-reader.

What are the Xteink S4’s specs?

While we don’t have all the details yet, Xteink issued a preorder announcement for the S4 this week that included some major hints:

• 1400mAh battery

• 6.98mm thick

• 95g weight

• Android 11 OS

• 2GB RAM

• 32GB storage

• Adjustable front light

• Physical buttons on the top and either side of the device

What’s currently unknown: the specific processor, how much storage it will potentially have (chatter suggests the support for an SD card has been dropped), and whether it will be able to access the Google Play store. However—and again, I’m working largely off of rumors here—we can reasonably expect it to be able to load e-reading apps like Kobo and Kindle, meaning you’ll be able to use it to access your existing e-book collections as well as sideload your own DRM-free files.

What will the Xteink S4 cost in the U.S.?

Xteink has yet to reveal its plan to release the S4 outside of China, which means we don’t yet know when it will be available in the U.S.—or what it will cost. We do have some hints, however: The announcement of preorders in China included promotional pricing: RMB299 (around $43) for customers who had previously purchased an X3 or X4, and RMB339 ($50) for those with “Cloud shareholder” status, whatever that means—it’s a perk exclusive to Chinese buyers. Rumors on Reddit suggest a regular price “in the RMB400s,” which would be closer to $60.

But those are speculations as to what the devices will cost in China. What does that tell us about U.S. pricing? Well, we’re definitely not getting the S4 for anywhere close to $43—as noted, on Amazon, the comparatively bare-bones X4 goes for around $70, and it’s hard to imagine a device that adds Android, a front light, and a touch screen won’t be pricier. At the same time, it can’t get too expensive or it’ll be butting up against the price of an entry-level Kindle ($109), which has a larger screen, is part of the trusted Amazon ecosystem, and undoubtedly offers a better out-of-the-box user experience.

If we compare the current Chinese prices of the existing Xteink devices, we can get a sense of the increase we might be looking at. The Chinese price for the X4 is RMB295. That’s around $43, but the X4 costs $69 on Amazon, a 60% increase. The X3 is RMB319, or around $46; that device sells for $79 from Xteink’s U.S. store, a 72% premium. Assuming reciprocal price increases, that means if the regular Chinese price for the S4 is RMB400, the U.S. price could be between $96 and $103. If I had to place a bet, I’d predict the S4 will cost $89—still comfortably below the Kindle’s $109 starting price. But of course, that’s still speculation until Xteink officially announces the U.S. release.

When will the Xteink S4 be available?

It’s currently unclear when the S4 will actually be available, either in China or the U.S. All we know is that Chinese preorders open up next week, on April 27. Xteink has yet to announce when the device will actually ship to Chinese customers, let alone when it will be available in the U.S. (I’ve reached out to its PR department and will update this post when I learn more.)

Who is the Xteink S4 for?

Assuming the rumors are right, the S4 is going to be a pocket-sized Android reader that can access reading apps and which offers all the most in-demand e-reader features—namely, both a touch screen and physical buttons for navigation and a temperature-adjustable front light. If it can do all that for less than $100, it would instantly replace the Boox Palma 2 as my go-to recommendation for anyone who wants a smaller e-reader that isn’t tied to one particular shopping ecosystem—and the Palma 2 costs closer to $250 in the U.S. (It’s currently unavailable, meaning you’d need to spend $400 on the Boox Palma 2 Pro, which is much closer to a full-featured smartphone than an e-reader.)

In short, while imported e-readers will always be a niche product, the S4 could be a true game-changer for those who prioritize portability and don’t want to buy all of their books from Amazon. And judging by how many times I’ve been stopped in public and asked questions about my Xteink X3, that could be more people than you’d think.

AI-generated images are getting harder and harder to spot. There are the usual tells, of course, but those tells are minimizing with each new AI image model. You could count on AI-generated hands including too many or too few fingers on people, for example; nowadays, that’s not necessarily the case.

One particular area of weakness for AI image models has been text generation. The image itself might look convincing, but take a close look at the words, and you’ll often notice they’re not really right. Maybe some are accurate, while others are pretty close, but, in many cases, you’ll notice a lot of inconsistencies: Too many repeating letters, letters that aren’t really letters, characters that blend and squiggle in and out of one another. A lot of these quirks remind me of how Star Wars’ language looks, at least when AI is trying to replicate American English.

OpenAI’s Images 2.0 is capable of generating highly realistic AI images

But the latest AI models are getting much better with text generation. In fact, OpenAI’s latest model for ChatGPT, Images 2.0, can render highly realistic text, and a lot of it—to the point where I’m not sure many of us (or any of us) will be able to spot it. According to OpenAI, Images 2.0 is the company’s first image model with thinking capabilities: That means the model can take its time breaking down each step of a request, which may generate more detailed or accurate images, as well as the ability to generate up to eight images from one prompt (though this is only available for paid subscribers). Free users can still take advantage of Images 2.0 perks, like how it searches the web for information and double-checks its work. The company says that “results feel less AI-generated and more intentionally designed,” which essentially means images generated using ChatGPT are going to be much more difficult to spot going forward.

The company seems very confident in this latest model. It touts the number of different types of images it can create—not just photorealistic pictures, but screenshots of a computer’s UI, a magazine collage, a mound of rice (that’s a lot to generate), a magazine page, and a handwritten essay. They mean handwritten, too, down to a coffee stain on the paper. You can scroll through these examples on OpenAI’s official announcement post to see how shockingly realistic they are. The post includes other examples, like highly realistic photographs, graphic novel pages, movie posters, and images with different aspect ratios—down to the iPhone’s panorama view.

All of these developments are as impressive as they are distressing, but for me, it’s the improvements to text that really take this to another level. Many models are getting quite good at generating images that trick users into thinking they’re real, but the level of detail in text and writing on these examples is something I haven’t yet seen. I asked ChatGPT to generate me a menu for an Italian restaurant, highlighting five dinner courses and two desserts—I left the specific dishes up to the AI’s discretion. It managed to generate something realistic, with dinner and dessert entries without mistakes—as far as I could tell. I then asked it to generate a newspaper entry announcing that the Red Sox and Yankees would be switching cities. It did that too, again without any obvious mistakes.

I’m not saying these images are perfect: They still have an AI “sheen” to them, that a trained eye or close observer would be able to notice. OpenAI says that Images 2.0 struggles with certain complex task, like puzzles, as well as details found on hidden or oddly placed areas, like reversed surfaces. But none of that really matters when the images this model produces are impressive enough to fool most people who scroll past them. Infographics, photographs, maps, comics, movie posters, you name it: People are going to be using this tool, and you’re going to start seeing a lot more AI images in your life—often without ever knowing it.