Whenever audio starts, there’s a couple second delay before I can hear it. Haven’t been able to solve that so I just live with it.

That can be because of a power saving feature - basically PulseAudio puts your sound card to sleep when nothing is playing, and then there’s a bit of lag before it wakes up. In my case it was really annoying because I use the optical output, so when PulseAudio put the sound card to sleep, my receiver would also go to sleep after a bit, and resulted in quite a bit of a delay when it was time to get it come back up.

This fixed it for me (see part 4.8): (link)[https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PulseAudio/Troubleshooting]

That stuff doesn’t even work right on Windows anymore.

It’s kind of sad, 10-15 years ago I’d say everyone (both Linux and Windows) more or less had the whole sleep/hibernate thing figured out. But it’s all gone to shit in the past few years.

The old Podcast app was simple, it did one thing, and it did it well. YouTube Music seems to be trying to do a dozen different things, and it does a shit job of all of them.