Android player MBID submission support

Freso · October 5, 2019, 12:17pm

I know that Simple Scrobbler at least does this already… if provided by the player. I don’t know which players (if any) actually read this information and pass it on.

zeremy · October 5, 2019, 3:04pm

Thanks,
Good to know that the code exists in Simple Scrobbler.
I will test out a few more players and maybe find one that supports it.

Freso · October 5, 2019, 3:19pm

Great. Please do report back if you find any that work.

zeremy · October 5, 2019, 3:24pm

While reading the API

github.com

simple-last-fm-scrobbler/sls/blob/84cbc5bea52c2ab143986aa66c315bd9900d92c6/Developer's API.md

## Introduction

Any app can easily scrobble their music through Simple Last.fm Scrobbler (SLS). Just to send certain broadcasts with the appropriate track information, and SLS will do the all the account management, network requests and error-handling etc.

Implement the behavior below, and it should just work. Or, if you prefer, email me some specifications on the notifications your app sends and I'll implement directly into SLS.

If you use this API you could send me an email, [simple.lfm.scrobbler@gmail.com](mailto:simple.lfm.scrobbler@gmail.com), and tell me about your app. That way I can add it to the list of supported apps.

If you have any questions about this API, or suggestions on how to improve it, I'd be happy help or discuss it with you.

## Details

The broadcast action is:

`com.adam.aslfms.notify.playstatechanged`

The intent your app broadcast must contain one of these states:

    | State      | Integer value | What it means                             |
    +------------+---------------+-------------------------------------------+

This file has been truncated. show original

it seems that only

 mbid         | String | No       | A MusicBrainz Recording ID <https://musicbrainz.org/doc/MBID>

is supported.

zeremy · October 8, 2019, 5:15am

Nothing to report unfortunately.
After testing most of the listed players

github.com

simple-last-fm-scrobbler/sls/blob/master/Compatability.md

Last Updated August 7th 2019

### NOTICE: If you have Android Lollipop or up, your device allows that Simple Scrobbler should be compatible with most android music apps.

Should you notice a data mistake, please create a pull request or notify the developers.

* Default Android Music Player
* HTC Hero Music Player
* LG Music Player
* MIUI Music Player

**(sd)** Uses the [Scrobble Droid API](http://code.google.com/p/scrobbledroid/wiki/DeveloperAPI) - identifies under "Enabled apps" as "Scrobble Droid Apps".

**(amp)** It presents itself to SLS as the Android Music Player. This means that it won't show up under "Enabled apps" under its real name, but under Android Music Player.

| Code | Type of Broadcast            | Note                                             |
|------|------------------------------|--------------------------------------------------|
| sd   | ScrobbleDroid                | if you disable it in SLS, all apps using it fail |
| amp  | Android Music Player         | if you disable it in SLS, all apps using it fail |
| sls  | Simple Last.fm Scrobbler API |      Ideal Scrobble broadcast for SLS                                            |

This file has been truncated. show original

none had mbid value in the intent broadcast.

zeremy · October 31, 2019, 9:32pm

I couldn’t find any app that provided mbid by the player, so I forked Vanilla Music Player https://github.com/vanilla-music/vanilla
and modified it to read/store the value and send it using Scrobble Droid API with simple-last-fm-scrobbler

Deleted_Editor_2217999 · June 13, 2020, 7:53am

Most players read metadata through Android’s inbuilt MediaMetadataRetriever which does not have the option to read MBIDs. This is the reason why very few players have support for MBIDs. I have opened a request with Android Open Source project to change this. Interested users may visit https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/158468801 for updates.

MrClon · August 14, 2020, 1:25am

So, this fork will be merged to upstream? Is there any news?

zeremy · August 14, 2020, 7:30am

I created a PR back in October, it wasn’t merged.

regagain · August 15, 2020, 4:47pm

That’s great! Any chance you could provide an apk? puppy eyes

regagain · August 15, 2020, 5:31pm

I have posted a feature request for VLC: https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc-android/-/issues/1458

yuioen · May 12, 2021, 6:54pm

I try to build your fork but didn’t get any mbid submission, when i look the debug console in android studio I don’t see what data is send to the scrobbler. How can I debug this ?

If I can get it work I will submit another merge request since you close yours

yuioen · May 13, 2021, 9:25am

Vanilla can read the mbid :
VanillaMusic: Broadcasting :94f809bd-21b0-4a17-8a4e-aa590e48075a

simple scrobble don’t receive the mbid :
2021-05-13 11:19:39.499 5379-27935/com.adam.aslfms D/Scrobbler: ListenBrainz: Track [mTrack=Tijuana, mArtist=Manu Chao, mAlbum=Próxima estación... Lado B, mAlbumArtist=, mDuration=185, mMbId=, mMusicAPI=MusicAPI [clashWithScrobbleDroid=0, enabled=1, id=1, msg=generic receiver, name=Vanilla Music, pkg=ch.blinkenlights.android.vanilla], mQueued=false, mRating=, mRowId=240, mSource=P, mTimePlayed=0, mTracknr=, mUnknownDuration=false, mWhen=1620897425, mWhenToCountTimeFrom=-1]

here is the code I used to have the log from vanilla :
Log.v("VanillaMusic", "Broadcasting :" + song.mbid)
I don’t know how to get the full string send to simple scrobbler from sendBroadcast(intent);

seem like vanilla user scroble droid format instead of the stock format to sendbroadcast

files :

jesus2099 · November 23, 2021, 11:25am

The best player I found for my Android was Sony Music Center (but it had several different names in the past).
How can I test if it sends the MBID to Simple Scrobbler (I know it used to scrobble with that app), if this test is still useful, here?

StratusFearMe21 · January 10, 2023, 5:50pm

I made a fork of mpv-android which supports complete scrobbling.

This fork supports scrobbling all the metadata available in the audio file including the MBIDs. However, it only works if

You select your music through the File Picker (Legacy) option
You go to Settings>Advanced>Edit mpv.conf, and add these lines

script=liblistenbrainz_mpv.so
script-opts=listenbrainz-user-token={YOUR_USER_TOKEN}

If you want better playback quality with high quality audio gear, and don’t care about a slight decrease in battery life, add this line

audio-swresample-o=resampler=soxr,precision=27

The source code for the backend can be found here

You can find an APK here!

StratusFearMe21 · March 18, 2023, 11:05pm

It’s me again! I’ve made a plugin for PowerAmp that can scrobble complete and accurate information to MusicBrainz. It does this by reading the file you’re playing with it’s own tag reading library, and then scrobbling it itself.

This plugin is battle-tested, and I’ve been using it for the entire year so far (see StratusFearMe21's Listens - ListenBrainz)
This plugin also caches listens that couldn’t make it to ListenBrainz, so offline listens won’t be lost.
This plugin always runs in the background to see what you’re listening to. If you want to make sure that it is running, enable the notifications permission in the app’s system settings page
This plugin doesn’t launch at boot (I don’t know how to do that, sorry)
This plugin assumes that nothing is playing in PowerAmp when the plugin launches, if something is, click the X button in the playing notification to stop PowerAmp temporarily.
The source code I wrote uses a lot of dependencies on my local system, so I can’t post it to GitHub just yet. But I can assure you that my code only sends web-requests to ListenBrainz, is hand-written (no ChatGPT here), and is mostly written in Rust, so you shouldn’t have to worry about any load when this plugin is running.
- As a side-effect of this, the APK only works on arm chips, sorry Android emulators.

Note

This plugin will request access to your full filesystem, this is so that it can read your audio files directly from disk, without relying on PowerAmp’s lack of metadata. This app will also ask if it can run in the background, it needs to do this to monitor what PowerAmp is playing. As stated above, most of the code for this plugin is written in Rust, and it will spend most of it’s time doing literally nothing, don’t be concerned with battery usage here!

You can find an APK here

derat · March 19, 2023, 12:40am

Can you get by with requesting only the READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission (or maybe even just READ_MEDIA_AUDIO if you’re targeting API level 33)?

Right now, the app looks like it’s requesting MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE and WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE. As I understand it, MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE is only intended for e.g. file managers that really need full access, and requesting it will probably prevent the app from getting approved for the Play Store.

StratusFearMe21 · March 19, 2023, 4:45am

Well, I wasn’t really planning on putting this on the Play Store, but I can probably address your concern

StratusFearMe21 · March 19, 2023, 5:10am

Okay, that should do it. I updated the APK so that it only needs the READ_MEDIA_AUDIO permission

APK is here now (I guess Google Drive is banned for some reason)