Pin vs Recommend vs Love (and Hate)

ListenBrainz
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I recently started using ListenBrainz and so far I’m quite impressed.

Since the recommendations, discovery and social aspects are of interest to me, I am trying to understand what is the difference between pinning a track, loving a track and recommending a track.

Going even further, are there any clients (e.g. audio players, scrobbling agents, music playing services) that connect the :heart:-ed tracks from the client with the ones in my ListenBrainz profile?

e.g., I would expect that if:

  • I :heart: a Portishead – Underwater Love in Deezer
  • it would be marked as “loved” in ListenBrainz
  • and when I check a local copy of Portishead’s Smoke City album e.g. in my Amarok or Elisa player, I would see Underwater Love as :heart:’d
  • and when I check the album/track in my Funkwhale collection, I would see it :heart:’d there too

P.S. Well aware of the *Brainz projects for many years, but first time poster.

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I use my own tool Scotty to sync my loved tracks from Navidrome to ListenBrainz. It also supports Deezer and Funkwhale, so it could work for your case. Ideally your files in your Funkwhale setup are already tagged with MusicBrainz IDs, that makes love submission easier. But Scotty tries to find matching using the ListenBrainz API if not.

In my case I have set it up as a cronjob on my server were I also host Navidrome.

The other way around, syncing loved tracks from ListenBrainz to the other services, unfortunately is not yet implemented.

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Thanks, @outsidecontext, that is pretty cool. I’ve bookmarked it, to check out later, when I get to that point (and Funkwhale 2.0 finally gets out, so I install it again).

But I’m still confused regarding the difference between a pinned, recommended and loved track.

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A loved track is showing in the list of your loved tracks. This is primarily for you and not so much a social feature. I’m not sure if the current recommendation system uses this info or how (but I think it excludes tracks you hated).

Recommendations show up in your feed and aso in the feeds of people following you as something like “hook recommended…”.

Pinned tracks also show up in your feed and in the feeds following you, but they also show on your listen profile as pinned for some time. So it’s kind of similar to recommendations, but highlights the track on your profile also.

Someone else might be able to add some more details, but the above is my experience with the features as a user.

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Thanks again, @outsidecontext. That sheds some light, yes.

But I remain a bit confused still, because I can see both loved/hated and pinned tracks in profiles (and the pins clearly at least last over a year):

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So if I connect everything I’ve learnt from you and observing, it seems to me that:

  • love / hate – mainly for your own use and your recommendations, but anyone can see it in your profile
  • pin – highlight a track and add notes to it, shows in the feed of those who follow you and stays in your profile (i.e. persistent)
  • recommendation – highlight a track to the public (or just a single person), shows (only) in the feeds of those o follow you (i.e. ephemeral and can be targeted)
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