Njos2SQEZtPVRhHListenBrainz about to hit 100k users
https://piefed.social/c/technology/p/1890297/listenbrainz-about-to-hit-100k-users
FizzGot the app on my phone and the player on my PC is linked and donated $5. Listen brainz is a treasure that will pay dividends to open source for years to come.
Yessss! I am so jazzed to see other people in this thread who love Listenbrainz as much as I do.
I will always love it because it was my first ever contribution to open source software. It was only documentation, because I’m a mediocre programmer, but documentation is a big deal for projects like these.
What I really liked about contributing is that I felt a real sense of contributing to something bigger than myself. I mean, I feel that with the fact that my listening data gets added to the pool itself, but I felt it even more so when helping with the documentation.
It was only something small, but I liked the idea that I was helping future tinkerers experience a little less frustration than I felt when I struggled with the outdated documentation. It made me happy to think that I was facilitating more people to tinker. I may only be a mediocre programmer, but that just means I am well placed to help pave the way for people more skilled than I am. This is the kind of project that I want to exist in the world, and so helping to support it genuinely makes me feel a little more hopeful in the face of this increasingly enshittified world
xpeyUsed Last.fm for like 3 months before finding out about ListenBrainz and making the switch. Truly amazing app, love all of their services (Picard my goat) and I’m happy to hear more people are joining!
I wish the social aspect was a bit more active though, I always follow people with similar taste but I never get a follow back (and the accounts always have 0 people they follow). Also I never see pinned songs and such :(
I agree on the social aspect lacking a bit. But who knows, ListenBrainz got better and better over the past years, perhaps with more users there will be more demand for social functionalities aswell, and perhaps they’ll be implemented in the future. LB was very rudimentary when I signed up, it’s nice seeing it grow and improve.
Yeah, it’s pretty low on the social side of things. However, having watched the massive progress the project has made over the last few years makes me hopeful that it’ll continue to improve. They seem to be quite smart about how they go about developing new features, which is wise for an open source project. It’s been pretty cool to watch how good their recommendation algorithm has been getting though, compared to when I first joined
This is pretty much the step I need to get back to listening to my own music rather than streaming. Can it plugin to ‘offline’ apps?
The other way around, and yes.
kawaiidango.github.io/pano-scrobbler/ is one example, but most decent Desktop/Mobile applications have some sort of plugin.
e8CArkcAuLEapparently it has navidrome support :)
navidrome enables you to have your own music library on a device from that you then stream it on your other devices
AppoxoDepends on the app.
If it caches the plays and syncs it back to the scrobble service?
Probably possible.
Afaik it’s not possible for Jellyfin.
If it caches the plays and syncs it back to the scrobble service?
Probably possible.
Afaik it’s not possible for Jellyfin.
nelbiumThere is a Jellyfin Plugin for this.
https://github.com/lyarenei/jellyfin-plugin-listenbrainz
RustyNova
Lena“Give us more data so we can take any of the effort out of deciding what to like.” is a big miss for me.
I’ll happily take my 30 minutes of scrolling Bandcamp and YouTube at bedtime for new artists if it means that my preferences and habits are none of your fucking business.
Fair enough, personally I don’t mind using algorithms as long as they are fully transparent
Meta said at the outset that they were fully transparent.
Pass on further delegating my brain to a machine.
MetaBrainz is a non-profit dedicated to open-source and open-data. So if people don’t like the algorithms LB has integrated, they can just build their own.
About not delegating your brain to machines, that’s a fair point, and I would encourage people to consciously choose where to use machines and where to use their brain. If you enjoy searching for music, it would be foolish to delegate it to a machine. For me personally though it’s usefull, using an algorith here allows me to spend energy on other things that are equally stimulating for my brain. I particularly like LBs ‘fresh releases’ feature, which gives you heads up about new releases by artists that you’ve listened to.
“About not delegating your brain to machines, that’s a fair point, and I would encourage people to consciously choose where to use machines and where to use their brain”
Yeah, big agree on this front. We should be using technology as a tool to aid us to do the stuff we care about, rather than letting ourselves be made subordinate to the tech itself. For some people, that kind of agency means using an open source system like Listenbrainz, and for some, like the person you’re replying to, that means continuing to discover music in their own way. Both of these approaches are fine — indeed, the whole point of building tech that serves as tools is that if our experience tells us that we have a task that wouldn’t benefit from the tool, we can just leave it in the box.
Personally, I enjoy going for a combination approach — I sometimes use listenbrainz as a catalyst to help me discover new stuff beyond my experience, but once I have a few new artists I’m interested in, I then go and do some manual digging around them. I don’t need to do this manual work part of it, but it’s a key part of my enjoyment of the music discovery process — so I can somewhat relate to the person you’re replying to’s preference
db0- Eavesdrop.FM, submits Plex music listening data to ListenBrainz
- phooks, a python script that submits local Plex listens using web hooks and file lookups
Link plex to your last.fm account so it scrobbles and then let LZ auto-import every 30 min from last.fm. Thats the simplest way.
N-E-NI used to use the ListenBrainz app to scrobble from YT music until it had a stroke around December, so now I use Pano Scrobbler on Android. You can tell it what apps to monitor/scrobble from.
I found a web scrobbler extension that seems to be pretty popular on github that’s available for like every browser and supports multiple services. But I haven’t tried this before yet.
Unrelated Selfhosting NoteI also selfhost a Navidrome, which can scrobble automatically on both web or via Andriod clients like Tempus once you link your account in the server settings. I love my Navidrome + Tempus combo ❤️
Hear hear! I love me the brainz projects. Their player is a bit buggy still but so so good to avoid being locked in
oneguynickThank you for the reminder! Donated today. Such a great service
As someone who only cares about the stats and social features , i still do not see what listenbrainz has over lastfm
1hitsongDo I need a #2?
Yes. People cares about features they are interested in , not who own it
blitzenThat’s the ideology that is causing the fediverse no never go mainstream. Although mastodon 8 millions registred users is impressive
You got that backward, chief. Not caring who controls these companies are keeping people glued to Meta, X, and the like.
How will you make people care. Certainly not with talking about privacy which the fediverse is not even good at it. In fact rhe best way to promote privscy is to not make it your major selling points
Website is a broken mess on mobile. I’ll check it out later.
I have been using Last.fm for almost 20 years. Still using it because I already know it well and it works.
I hadn’t done my homework yet on ListenBrainz, despite using Picard for a couple years now.
Welp, your words convinced me that I should make the switch. Thank you for your post!
Can someone explain to a Gen x guy what “listening data” gets me? I’ve been living off a folder of mp3s for 30 years. Does this use my music? Does this get it from the Internet somewhere? How is it different from asking Alexa to play music for me? Thanks.
It’s a scrobbling service. You send your listening data to it so that you can see your listening habits and share them with other people (your top songs, which countries the artists you listen to are from, etc.). It’s just interesting data that some people like to collect, but if you only throw on your mp3s and don’t care about that, then you probably won’t find much use in setting it up.
Edit: to clarify what “listening data” means here, it just means the metadata of the music you play. Song name, artist, album. Nothing fancy. I think it also supports marking songs as favorites.
JensSpahnpastaI’ve been using LastFM for nearly two decades now. First of all, having personal listening statistics is kind of fun. It might be not for everybody, but it’s nice to see which albums are your most played over a year or what you listened to back in 2015, how your favorite artists changed, which album really vibed with you and so on.
Second, you can get really good recommendations for new music when you have a larger user base and are running into a smaller genres. So just like Amazon’s and people who bought this product also bought that product for music. So people who listen to Britney Spiels also like to listen to Christina Aguilera. That might be obvious for you, but it’s totally interesting if you go down some of these genres and if you want to explore them.
And on a broader scale, listening data is quite valuable to create a good music service. So if somebody never heard of a band called Deep Purple and wants to change that, there might be this one song everybody knows from Deep Purple. And this is, of course, the most popular, but how do you find out that this is the most popular? So if you have your own Jellyfin installation, you load in several albums of Deep Purple, but you need some data source to tell you that ‘smoke on the water’ is that famous song from Deep Purple that everybody’s listening to.
RouthinatorI love listening stats, I just don’t need to share them, and for that I have Navidrome. I use subsonic clients and a Navidrome server for my Bandcamp purchased. I get the stats and privacy too…
I’ve been living off a folder of mp3s for 30 years.
Same here. I love that shit. My mood is the algorithm. I still occasionally get new stuff, but from other sources I happen to see or hear, like a Netflix show that has it in the background or a musician’s personal recommendation in an interview, and I go look it up manually. But even if I never got anything new, I already have more music than I could easily listen to in a lifetime that I already know I liked at least once.
I’ve tried streaming sources, but it never hits right. This way, where I am specifically picking the artist or album, it’s always right, always fresh, and I’m always listening to something I want to hear.
where I am specifically picking the artist or album, it’s always right
That’s a remarkable level of effort, these days. Yes, I know, it’s trivial compared to pulling vinyl from the sleeve and flipping it every 20 minutes the way I used to before 1985, but… I prefer to put in my music effort with focus, and let a mix algorithm surprise me when I’m not in “music picking mode.” To me, it’s much more enjoyable to hear a song I like that I wasn’t expecting than it is to think about it, navigate the list of thousands to find my pick, and then hear the thing I was thinking of.
It’s all good. I think it has a lot more to do with accommodating one’s own brain, and how we individually categorize and enjoy our listening, than with specifics of music like genre/artist/album/track.
For myself, I almost always have some tune or another out of nowhere running through my head, so when I choose something to listen to, I am either picking with or against what’s already playing. So if I tune in to the music that’s already playing, I can see associated choices that are the same, similar, or completely unrelated on a superficial level, but my brain has linked them all somehow. Any of those choices, if I put them on, will satisfy because my brain is already playing one and mentally I’m already there.
I think the reasons algorithms never work for me is because no one could ever follow that, much less predict it. Even I can’t. Instead I’ve learned to simply accommodate it.