Interpreting Listenbrainz time stamps

ListenBrainz
1

Hello, please could someone help me interpret Listenbrainz time stamps?

e.g. this listen

{
“inserted_at”: 1780527328,
“listened_at”: 1780527228,
“recording_msid”: “dd40dfe2-e608-41bd-a555-b58b9e17418d”,
“track_metadata”: {
“additional_info”: {
“artist_mbids”: [
“34dc9fd3-eb1c-437e-8a58-8b2323bb0ffd”
],
“duration_ms”: 221579,
“media_player”: “PowerAmp”,
“recording_mbid”: “dca832eb-a152-4345-87ee-10c99262b369”,
“recording_msid”: “dd40dfe2-e608-41bd-a555-b58b9e17418d”,
“release_mbid”: “6de57cd0-7ab1-4c86-8339-8c8b1d128241”,
“submission_client”: “ListenBrainz PowerAmp”,
“submission_client_version”: “1.0.4”
},
“artist_name”: “Wanderwelle”,
“mbid_mapping”: {
“artist_mbids”: [
“34dc9fd3-eb1c-437e-8a58-8b2323bb0ffd”
],
“artists”: [
{
“artist_credit_name”: “Wanderwelle”,
“artist_mbid”: “34dc9fd3-eb1c-437e-8a58-8b2323bb0ffd”,
“join_phrase”: “”
}
],
“caa_id”: 25936503412,
“caa_release_mbid”: “6de57cd0-7ab1-4c86-8339-8c8b1d128241”,
“recording_mbid”: “dca832eb-a152-4345-87ee-10c99262b369”,
“recording_name”: “Amor Fati”,
“release_mbid”: “6de57cd0-7ab1-4c86-8339-8c8b1d128241”
},
“release_name”: “A State of Decrepitude”,
“track_name”: “Amor Fati”
},
“user_name”: “boysmithers”
}

The time stamp (listened at) is 1780527228
This is 20260603 at 23:53 (by checking my user profile

but can anyone explain why?
Is it related to a time and date or just a “number”?
Is it possible for a human to look at this and interpret it as a date and time?
Thanks!

2

Those timestamps are Unix timestamps, very common in development practices as it represents a universal timestamp in UTC.

You can use websites like https://www.unixtimestamp.com/ to convert the timestamp to human readable. Usually when consuming this kind of data, there are systems in place to convert this timestamp to human readable format (like you can see on your profile page).

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3

:open_mouth:
Excellent, that is cool - counting the seconds since the 1st of January 1970!
Many thanks for telling me, I feel like I’ve learned quite a lot of internet/computer stuff that I wouldn’t have come across since I started using LB…

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4

It turns out what should be a fairly simple thing to deal with (time, dates) in the coding world is actually a never-ending rabbit hole of complications, variations, edge cases and downright goofy shit.
If you are ever curious, this won’t give you answers or reasons but will give you an idea of the scale of the issue: Falsehoods programmers believe about time, in a single list · GitHub

A very, very small example of the type of issues we face daily: those timestamps above are the number of seconds since the “Unix epoch”, that 1st Jan. 1970.
That’s all fine and dandy for the server, however the website itself uses Javascript, which works with the same timestamps but in milliseconds since the Unix epoch.
Forget to multiple your timestamp by 1000 and you’ll see some surprising dates…

3 Likes