Allow me to spread the word about ListenBrainz, the occasion being that ListenBrainz now stores over 1 billion entries of listening data from it’s users. ListenBrainz is a FOSS project that aims to crowdsource listening data and release it under an open license. Basically it’s Last.fm but better.
Whatever you use to listen to music, you can probably link it up with ListenBrainz. For instance you can connect Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud, Last.fm. You can link it up with loads of music players. If you’ve kept track of your what music you’ve listened to up to this point, don’t worry, there are several ways to import them into ListenBrainz.
All ListenBrainz listening data is available for all to use. This means that we don’t need to rely on big companies like Spotify for recommendation algorithms. We can use whatever algorithm suits us best. All sorts of other services could be build to make use of the ListenBrainz data set. The dataset can also help analyze other services’ algorithms, for instance the Fair MusE project uses LB-data and LB-users to investigate the fairness of different music service algorithms.
Obviously ListenBrainz initially suffered from being a comparatively small service, For good recommendations you need loads of data. But it’s growing every day and I feel like the 1 billion listens is an impressive milestone. And ListenBrainz has the advantage of having listening data from several services, Spotify could never recommend you music that’s not on Spotify. ListenBrainz, because it’s open, doesn’t have such inherent blindspots.
I am not working for ListenBrainz in any way, I just really like this project as well as MusicBrainz, and I like to spread the word. I think the aims of the ListenBrainz probably align with some Fediverse-folks. If you don’t care about the service itself, you could still link up to support FOSS music services, not only LB itself, but other services that are, can and will be built using LB’s data. If you use another service to store your own listening data, for instance Last.fm, you could use ListenBrainz as a backup for you data in case the other sevice ever enshittifies. Note: you shouldn’t sign up if you want your listening data to be private, that’s not what LB is for. I care very much about privacy, but in the case of LB I consciously choose to share my music listening data with others for my own benefit.
Curious to hear peoples thought on all this.
Crowd sourced, open access FLOS(Data) is almost always good. will check it out. thanks!
I use Plex to play music most of the time (I know, but it works). Do you know if there’s a webhook or script available that would scrobble from Plex to ListenBrainz? I skimmed the list of player integrations and didn’t see anything.
They do have a webhook for PLEX, I set mine up a while ago so I don’t remember the exact steps.
Edit: found it, it’s eavesdrop.fm
Whats wrong with Plex?
Plex is fine as a whole, it just handles my music library kind of clunkily and doesn’t have much support for organization or dynamic playlists. It’s obviously meant more for movies and shows and that’s why Plexamp exists (which I don’t use).
Whenever I posted on /r/Plex on Reddit, people would comment that I should use another player, but that place is a cesspool with dedicated Plex haters; it’s so weird. Plex does function as a music player, it’s just a bit unfocused (design-wise) and bloated.
When I don’t want to boot up Plex I use mocp, a terminal-based music player, so I’m not in need of a fancy player like Deadbeef, Strawberry, Audacious, MediaMonkey, Musicbee, etc. but they do offer more to the user than Plex does.
I never used Plex so I wouldn’t be able to help you but the page below has 2 Plex-related links.
I assume people are still bitter plex is what it is now?? Is jellyfin anywhere on par? I’m kinda addicted to how badass plexamp is. I’m too spoiled to revert to VLC on my mobile.
I don’t know anything about Jellyfin as a user but I’ve heard from others Jellyfin and Emby are ready to compete with Plex on a level playing field. Not sure if it’s an exaggerated hype or not. :P
This is better than last.fm because it can scrobble your listens up to an hour before you play them.
What is your use case for that and what happens if you don’t end up listening to them?
It’s a joke. I think it’s a bug or something
I think the other comment was also a joke. But do check your timezone settings
This thing is an absolute beast, used it in the past to tag my library and it was amazing
You’re thinking of MusicBrainz Picard, the music file tagging software that is powered by MusicBrainz, a music metadata encyclopedia. ListenBrainz is a separate project, though it also makes use of the MusicBrainz data.
Oh yeah sorry, but I 100% support the MusicBrainz project
Fun fact: Sharkey, another Fediverse software (Misskey fork) has built-in ListenBrainz integration
very cool, but the site is not responsive for mobile users
Also doesn’t display anything without javascript
Does it work with tidal?
On Android you can install the ListenBrainz app and it will detect Tidal. For browsers, you can use this addon for scrobbling. There’s also a desktop repack of Tidal (Tidal HiFi) that does scrobbling to ListenBrainz.
Thanks!
Discovered this a month ago and have been using it. It’s alright, but hopefully it will improve with more users.
I’d really love it if it would work automatically with many, many music sources (including streaming services like Apple Music) because my listening is all over the place. Plus it would be great if it had a SoundHound/Shazam-like feature to scrobble audio I hear when in public but don’t want to type to search or I’m not sure of the song title.
Great to hear it works with Plex. I hope it also works with Jellyfin.
Jellyfin has a plugin.
Also works flawlessly with Spotify.
Edit: You know it supports Apple Music?
Could I use that to make it listen to live music that I make during jams and help me find what would make crowds jump?
Sweet I linked it to my spotify. This is exactly what I was looking for to help me move away from spotify.
Is there a way to hook the custom Listenbrainz playlists into Lidarr so I could have a new mix / recommended playlist each week?
This seems like a crypto project, or something that will eventually be used to train bad AI. I’d be wary
Does anyone know how to export anymore? I have so many listens that it just breaks on the client side when i press the button. They recently tried to fix it too but it’s still completely broken. and the export was my only reason for using it lol
The API of ListenBrainz is really simple. I built a simple MPV script to send my listenned tracks to ListenBrainz in few hours. It does the job pretty well, and I submitted almost 50K records.
For the moment I didn’t do anything with it, but I know I could someday.
