Pay attention to the cables you use too.

An old hdmi 1.0 isn’t going to get you 4k@240Hz.

I don’t know what specs the steam deck/your display are actually capable of, so no specific recommendations.

I like cables from ‘Cables Matter’ on Amazon. Nothing I’ve gotten from them has felt cheap or failed to live up to whatever its specs are.

I use Spytify, so I “download” my songs real time in the background. If anything it makes me more intentional about what I do grab. Grabbing the entire discography of an artists may take a day, so a little pre-veting is necessary. you find out why some of the big names only have 1 or 2 hits out of a hundred, but you also find some great songs that didn’t make it.

I’ll usually aquire a few albums at a time. I’ll give each song a quick pass (jumping to random parts) to determine the following

1. is the song awful and/or nothing like what the artist normally does = Delete.
2. is there dead space (a really long start/end of silence) or random talking/noises = trim
3. is it the volume stupidly loud/quiet compared to other songs = fix*
4. stupid rap section in the middle for no reason (thank god that trend is basically gone) = cut
5. what playlists does it belong in?

*I use MP3Gain for bulk volume adjustment, it does pretty good and is non-destructive, though not every player respects the adjustment (a tag in metadata or something)

I don’t catch everything doing this, mostly because I spend a few seconds on each song, but it does filter out a lot.

Sometimes it takes a few listens to decide “I dont like this song” - delete.

I’m not a completionist (or try not to be) for albums/artists. If I don’t like the song, its gone. If there’s one part of a whole that I don’t like, its chopped out.

Spytify

It records Spotify music real time, at the highest available bit rate (as long as you set it). Uses Spotify API to pull track metadata and album art. Its smart enough to not records ads and auto deletes tracks under 30 seconds (I think you can change the time)

It’s slower than YouTube DL, but having all the metadata sorted out for you is a big plus.

Its probably about 98% error free, sometimes a second of a song ending gets put on the next track. A quick cut/paste in Audacity and it’s fixed.

It works best if you have a separate audio device, otherwise other computer sound gets recorded too. I’m not going to do a full tutorial (unless someone asks), but basically you set the audio for Spotify on audio device #2, and continue as normal on audio device #1. It has a loopback feature too, so if you want to listen/record the same time you can.