What do YOU want in ListenBrainz?

ListenBrainz
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10

I would like to use LBz more, but many players do not or only imperfectly support mpris (Media Player Remote Interfacing Specification). I have had problems with my favourite players, VLC and Juk (amarok is not yet ported to kde5/qt5, so I have not been able to try it). Results seem to be good with rhythmbox.

Nevertheless, these only work when I listen on my laptop, which is almost never. I have ripped my extensive collection to flac and have the files stored on my QNAP NAS. These listens, about 95% of my listening, are lost. I also listen using VLC on my phone. Again, the listens are lost. Then, there are listens on NML (Naxos Music Library) and Youtube. These listens, too, are lost.

Apart from getting infallible ListenBrainz support in these applications, what would help me the most is a way to manually enter listens, preferably by album, not by track, as I listen to full albums about 99.99% of the time. It is tedious, but at least it would accurately record my listening.

I do not have a Last.fm account nor do I want one. Scrobblers that scrobble to Last.fm and require me to get their file and have the information sent to LBz are uselss. I want to scrobble or be able to manually input directly to LBz.

Once the information is in my LBz account, it would be useful to me if it, firstly, hyperlinked to the releases I own (these have been added to my collections in MBz). Next, it mght be useful to be able to discuss with other people that also have the same albums in their own collections and/or at least be able to follow their listening. Also, linking to CritiqueBrainz would be an asset, perhaps by displaying existing reviews, allowing one to directly write a review while listening, and to see other albums and artists that relate to, are similar to, are in a similar genre to, are liked and/or collected by others with the album in their own MBz collections or listened to by them, etc.—basically, link the various components of MetaBrainz together to create a unified listening, enjoyment, sharing, discussing, reviewing, exploring, learning etc. experience.

5 Likes
11

I have two suggestions: one that comes to me from feedback by others and one that is specific to me.

Others: More convenience for users

It should be more convenient to submit listens to LB. We need more convenience.

It is not convenient to submit listens to LB (beyond Android) from the people I know actively using Last.fm. One needs to first find a tool that supports ListenBrainz for your $PLATFORM of choice. The LB website does not link out to any specific tools or apps that support this.

I see a couple of ways to make this better:

  1. Add page to ListenBrainz.org with links to different submission tools and what platform(s) they support
  2. Some MeB developer attention to choose 1-2 critical platforms and create submission tools for those platforms (GSoC / GCI idea?)
  3. More obvious call-outs on website about how to submit listens – it is not actually described anywhere on the site other than the Import page

Pros

  • Build user community around LB by making it more convenient to use
  • Submission tools that submit plays in real time are familiar to users who already use Last.fm
  • Encourages a developer ecosystem to begin forming around LB (by calling out and recognizing developers and their tools with the highly-prized “front page” recognition on ListenBrainz.org)

Cons

  • MeB maintains 1-2 listen submission tools specific to some platforms – might not be the most demanding of development priorities
  • Could delay or impede progress on new features in LB (in terms of time/focus areas)

Other considerations

I think the timing of when to build out this community depends. On one hand, maybe we want more features and capabilities before we really start encouraging more people to use it (and then possibly being frustrated if it doesn’t have the same tools as something like Last.fm). On the other hand, changing focus to build the community sooner than later also enables more developers to discover the project and experiment with their own ideas based on what is possible today. Some of these people may even come on board later as proper LB contributors.

So, there are a lot of things to consider, but ultimately I think the user community should get a raised priority if the LB dev team is looking for new ideas on what to do and what to focus on. I don’t know if this aspect of LB has been part of a development roadmap before.

Me: Listening statistics :heart_eyes:

Statistics, metrics, data! :heart_eyes: I want to learn more (about my music, maybe myself) through the statistic ideas I explained here:

8 Likes
12

Oops, somehow I didn’t see the previous replies when I wrote mine. :sweat:

OMG I forgot about this. This is really important to me too just because I feel like I haven’t “fully” moved to LB from Last.fm because of the incorrect data. A lot of my LB history, especially between 2017 and 2018, has a lot of inaccuracies or false reporting. Often from duplicate plays, either from scrobblers or from duplicate imports.

Honestly I want a way to blow everything away and then re-import fresh from Last.fm. While my LB data has a lot of inaccuracies, I’ve worked hard to preserve the accuracy of my Last.fm scrobble history. So I’d really like to do a fresh import!

Ahhhh I didn’t think about this either but this is also important to me, only because every time I travel and look at my Last.fm statistics, they always report my “most frequent listening hours” wrong once I return to my home timezone.

Just curious, are you using Android? If so, have you tried either Simple Scrobbler or Pano Scrobbler?

Manually entering listens is nice and something I do occasionally on Last.fm. Usually I do this with a vinyl scrobbler app on Android that (unfortunately) does look-ups on Discogs based on searches or by scanning barcodes on releases to look them up.

Manual submissions by a release is a nice-to-have feature that I would definitely make use of, but I don’t think it is a critical feature just yet?

3 Likes
13

Yes, I use android. I haven’t tried either of these phone scrobblers or any other. I will have a look. I am somewhat suspect about using third-party software, due to security concerns. If it comes from MetaBrainz, Fedora, is part of android, ie., from Google, etc, then it’s ok, since I use those systems and have developed trust out of familiarity and necessity, but third-party apps piggybacking on trusted software could introduce security breaches, system instability, undesired access to other data on the device, etc.

Manual entry is not possible for me, as the various online mechanisms I have explored all submit to Last.fm, not to LBz.

The reason I think listen submission by release, i.e., by album, is important is that it is very tedious to enter dozens of listens manually when listening to a work. I am currently listening to Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise and it has 61 tracks! Imagine having to enter 61 tracks manually to record your listen! The typical symphony has 4 tracks and most albums are fleshed out with a smaller work or two to maximize the disk capacity, so a listen of a single album typically entails 4-12 tracks. The few times I have tried, I was forced to select one token track from each work, just to have a listening signpost, but this is not an accurate record of my listening… and if one were to use the data to reimburse copyright holders or for any other statistical purpose, it would be grossly inaccurate.

I cannot imagine why I would want to listen to just one track from a work. Very, very rarely, yes, to get a quick fix of a favourite part, but this might occur every few months. For that, I would just go to Youtube, when I am not seriously listening, but just dallying. Even pop music: imagine listening to only one track of a concept album—it just wouldn’t make sense. The purpose of the work would be lost.

1 Like
14

The only thing I found missing was the ability to hide listen history from the entire internet. It’s also worth taking into consideration that there are countries where listening to certain songs could reveal they’re part of certain minorities and it literally becomes life threatening. I personally don’t really have any issues with anyone reading my listen history, but some people definitely do.

The other thing I found lacking was basically the choice in general who to give the data to, I’d gladly give my listen history under some kind of mutual agreement (GPL-y terms) that the receiver actually contributes back to the project and for example doesn’t invent privacy-invasive proprietary adtech.

Of course I’d also love MBID linking but others have mentioned it already.

2 Likes
15

Hiding listens is an anti-goal and will not be implemented on the main server any time soon.
https://listenbrainz.org/goals

It has been discussed previously and there is nothing stopping someone running thair own server and adding features to hide listens.

16

I understand. In both cases, the Android scrobbling apps are open source:

Sometimes I do as a quick fix too, but I agree that it is not something I do often. When I scrobble manually to Last.fm, usually I do it by a Release instead of by the Recording.

3 Likes
17

Here are the 2 main features i’m expecting

  1. recommendation engine.
    I know it’s on its way, sorry i didn’t check it out yet, but what i’m expecting is a programable interface (some kind web api) similar to lastfm or now defunct echonest.
  2. listening statistics

Thanks so much for your work.
Cheers & Happy listening

5 Likes
18

I wrote my own scrobb… I mean music tracker, for my audio streamers. When one of my audiostreamers (Bluesound, MusicCast and Heos) play music, the program reports the songs via the ListenBrainz API to my ListenBrainz account.

My wish is that I could add a property that indicates which player(/streamer) is playing the music, so that LB front-end could show (and filter) on players.

4 Likes
19

This is a useful feature to encourage a larger client ecosystem around LB.

If you build your own client today, it is hard to “get the word out” about your handy tool. Combined with an idea of linking out to clients from listenbrainz.org, it would be awesome to show what client someone is using for their “Now Playing” music like Last.fm once did. Maybe drilling down to a specific play, it would be cool to see what player was used to submit a play.

As a user, I don’t find this interesting or useful to flip through my listen history to see what client was used, but I like to see what client I am currently using for my “now playing.”

Tying in the statistics piece again too (see above), this could enable downstream client devs to understand how widely used, or not, their client is!

4 Likes
20

I’ve stopped using LB for the time being. I was going to explain the complicated reason why, but I think it suffices to say that if I could wipe the data and re-import from last.fm I would start using it again. Re-importing from there would create a terrible mess so I’m just sticking to last.fm for the time being, so at least one is accurate.

That’s the main thing, other than that:

  • Linking to MBID’s would be great, and then displaying data (cover art etc etc) from those MBID’s in LB. This would encourage the addition/updating of data to the items in MB.

Last fm features I make use of, in order of appeal:

  • Album/artist/track chat (critiquebrainz integration goes a little way towards covering this) (I would also like to see this in MB, perhaps cross-channel)
  • Similar artist recommendations
  • The new(ish) stats are pretty cool
  • Compatibility stat with other users
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21

This sums up my thoughts pretty well.

1 Like
22

+1 Enable the option to remove / edit listens.

Music recommendations and or similar users history based on my listen history.

Spotify URLs even for entries where they haven’t been submitted.

+1 Player client history based by user agent used to submit listens.

More predefined (ready to load Sql) Queries at BigQuery.

An android app/client that submits MBID’s.

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Android player MBID submission support

24

More than anything I’d love to see some tools to be able to get some rudimentary per-user profile statistics like:

  • Top 10 songs of the week
  • Top 10 singles of the year
  • Top 10 songs of all time etc.
  • Artists discovered this year.

I tried to get some of this data via Big Query but there seemed to be a bug with how the data was stored which was preventing me from going deep into the past.

5 Likes
25

Hi @punkscience, welcome to the MetaBrainz forums. :slightly_smiling_face:

If you are interested in ListenBrainz statistics and metrics, you might find this thread interesting. Feel free to leave some feedback there:

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26

Would really like to seem time based charts. Lastimer.com was the one I remember using on Last.fm prior to the purge. There was also Normalisr which didn’t involve quite so much database traffic.

I also really liked the stream visualisation from Last chart (http://www.lastchart.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/). My Last.fm user icon is the last successful graph I got from them.

I would also like to see the possibility of embedding BBcode in profiles, as was possible with the old Last.fm. Allowing the community to grow and express itself organically like that seems like something to be aimed for.

Cheers

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27

Hey, just a heads up, we’ve written up this feature and released it now. It should be in your profile page (Sign in - ListenBrainz).

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28

Thanks everyone for all the feedback! Please keep it coming. We’re a bit resource constrained in terms of contributors but we are listening to you and making LB better for everyone slowly but steadily!

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29

Thanks @iliekcomputers for the follow-up and all the good work :wink:

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