Not an Expert in consumer hdr. What you want to calibrate isn’t contrast or brightness but gamma curve.

I was of the impression that the ia doesn’t delete, but instead puts files in quarantine until copyright runs out. Else they’d have to digitize it again later.

Youtube’s quality isn’t as bad as it’s used to be, in fact you can get pretty high quality aac and opus streams given that the upload had legit quality and your using legit software to download and not some shitty webapp.

From the YouTube Help section on “Encoding specifications for music videos”:

Although it is not recommended, YouTube accepts compressed audio. YouTube transcodes from the delivered format; audio quality is much better when transcoded from a lossless format compared to re-compressing a lossy audio format.

If you must deliver compressed audio, use these specifications:

Codec: AAC-LC
Sample Rate: 44.1Khz
Bit Rate: 320kbps or higher for 2 channels (higher is always better; 256 kbps acceptable)
Channels: 2 (stereo)

I won’ rant over youtube’s inferior sound quality, but please tag or mark your finished files as youtube sourced, at least if there’s any possibility you further share them.

I guess foobar2000 is non-foss as it’s free but not open source.