Local Music, Global Discovery
I listen to Music from my homelab server using Navindrome and several client apps. It works both when I am online and offline. But one of the things that you miss when you listen to local Music is discoverability. It’s not easy to find new, interesting Music unless you’re on one of those streaming providers.
But I found a way that works for me. It’s a very old-school way: I scrobble my listens to a provider that I trust, ListenBrainz, and look for suggestions from there onward. I have used MusicBrainz Picard to tag my MP3s before uploading them to Navindrome. So the choice was quite obvious.
My Navindrome installation was quite old. It worked, so why change? However, I had to get a new version for scrobbling. So, I pulled the latest image, reset the container, added a new environment variable ND_LISTENBRAINZ_ENABLED, and started it.
With that, when I went to personal settings, I selected Scrobble to ListenBrainz and entered the User Toke from ListenBrainz. And that’s it. Now, wherever I play the Music, It reaches the ListenBrainz.
I also use Web Scorbbler Addon on my desktop to scrobble from Bandcamp, Earth.fm, ScrobbleRadio, etc. Web Scrobbler Addon is an excellent piece of plumbing software. I love it. All MusicBrainz projects are also FOSS, Open Data, and Open Format friendly.
In a way, now I can own the data, which I can refer to later or remember to buy new Music. My profile is public; you might have to wait a couple of days to get a sense of my music taste. But feel free to send music recommendations.
Other related interesting links
- ListenBrainz APIs
- Maloja – Self-hosted music scrobble database to create personal listening statistics and charts
- Multi Scrobbler – Scrobble plays from multiple sources to multiple clients.
- Pano Scrobbler – FOSS Scrobbler for phones, TVs, tablets, and Android desktops. It can scrobble to ListenBrainz or similar systems, but it can also save it as a CSV or JSON file locally. It can also listen to the songs being played on other devices and scrobble them if you want.
- JSPF – JSON version of XSPF. An open format for playlists.
