What do YOU want in ListenBrainz?

ListenBrainz
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309

The stats in ListenBrainz are seriously disturbed at “album level”

Simple example: Top album & Top artists for albums I played once, always show exactly the amount of plays as there are tracks in the album.

There should be something that detects when an album is played in it’s entirety (consecutive plays of tracks of the same album), that takes care it is shown as 1 play for that artist & album.

Perfect stats are impossible, but having albums with 30 tracks below 1 minute always topping higher than albums with two tracks over 20 minutes makes the stats equal to random numbers.

Maybe there should be a way to keep separate stats for “singles/tracks” vs. “albums”.
Another thing that could possibly be involved is playtime for a artist stats.
(Probably experiments with calculations made involving Playtime for an artist, tracks from the same artist played consecutive after each other, % of a complete album/release being played, etc. could create more usable statistics.)

1 Like
310

I’ve though about it before and multiple types of stats could apply here:

  • Full album listens: The number of times an album was listened to in its entirety (or like 80%. To leave the interludes out + tracks you dislike). Not necessarily in order. I do have radio mixes that shove the entire album in the same playlist out of order, yet I’d count that a listen
  • Listen/tracks: The number of listen divided by the number of tracks. This should cull down the soundtracks albums, especially for game soundtracks.
1 Like
311

It’s tricky, if the solutions proposed are applied universally there will be other complaints - personally I don’t know if I want my default stats complicated beyond actual plays. Probably not tbh. I think it’s telling that last.fm never changed it, and they were around for a long time, with the resource to make those changes.

But I think having the option to toggle all the charts to “by time listened” rather than “by plays” would be excellent, and possibly solve the problem?

1 Like
312

Yes, huge improvement!

-by track plays (track & artist stats)
-by album plays (album & artist stats)
-by time listened (artist stats)
-by experimental algorithm (album & artist stats)

This would be my ultimate wishlist of possibilities.

The experimental algorithm would be some kind of sandbox/playground, where one can load/create/share different algorithms. Not just one default.

Probably just dreaming :wink: Being able to adjust the way statistics are created could make it a powerful tool to visualise listening behaviour in various ways. I don’t believe there is something like an all-fitting way in such things.

Where calculations come in: If I play a 10 minute EP 5 times, it should rank higher for me, than when I play that 60 minute album twice, imo. That’s why I think about calculations where one could give a certain weight to certain numbers. But you are right no algorithm should be forced upon anyone. It could only exist as an optional view, with complete transparency about the actual weight in the calculation.

Currently my short term stats simply show which album has most tracks. (both for top albums as for top artists). While I know all these were just played once. Playing an album with 20 tracks should not show 20 plays for that album, but only 1. I think that’s a major flaw.

The idea of @RustyNova , sounds good to me in how to determine album plays. Counting 1/2 plays as 1/2 plays, sounds like music to me. Although I’d rather count by % of total time. (Skipping that long boring tracks is different from skipping a short intro, for instance)

Implementing custom calculations is probably complex to realise, but wild ideas never hurt. Being able to see stats by playtime, and/or fixing the album count to actually count albums, instead of tracks within the album, would already be a huge leap forwards.

3 Likes
313

What do you want in ListenBrainz?

On album pages, bars whose length is proportional to the number of listens, for each track.
Like on last.fm :

Screenshot Last.fm
Screenshot Last.fm892×502 13.7 KB

Currently there’s the number of listens, but it’s not visual. With a bar chart, you can instantly see which tracks are the most listened to, and in what proportions.

4 Likes
314

I may be a very special use case. But I listen to a lot of relatively obscure Japanese artists despite not being a Japanese speaker myself.

Many times, the English name of a given Japanese song / Artist (For example: Nigredo by Susumu Hirasawa) is listed under a pseudo release, and thus given the English name on the track, but in searching for recordings, I am unable to use the standard musicbrainz search to match a given listen to a recording in listenbrainz

So what I’d like is the ability to search for recordings by associated track names within the listenbrainz “link with musicbrainz” search.

3 Likes
315

I don’t know what the style for pseudo releases are, but aren’t the track recordings supposed to be the same?

316

They are but you can’t search for recordings based on their pseudo release titles or the artist credit on their pseudo-releases.

At least it’s never once worked when I tried it for the artists I frequently need to link.

317

In Last.fm, I can view the play counts for all songs and albums under an artist in my library, the play counts for all tracks within an album, and the complete play history of a specific song, with the ability to directly edit them in these interfaces. I wonder if ListenBrainz could add these very practical features.

5 Likes
318

I’m really hoping for a personal library like last.fm offers where I can check the listening history of every song and statistics of every song/album/artists, albums/songs under artists, songs under albums, etc. This will definitely require a lot of work, but I sincerely wish it could be done.

5 Likes
319

i want view my library of vinyl records / cassettes / cd’s that i own somewhere in listenbrainz.
and when i don’t know what to listen to, i want to push a button and it randomly suggests one for me. (maybe have the option to select for random or albums that you haven’t listend in a long time)

it would be handy if you could also directly manually add the listens for that album from there aswel.

4 Likes
320

Related: https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/LB-1231

2 Likes
321

nice, i’ve added a +1.

the only thing is that i think listenbrainz is standalone thingy. for people who don’t add data to musicbrainz. so i think they should be able to create a collection themself without having to make them go to a different platform…

322

I could see two things for that:

  • Being able to submit raw listen data (Could be useful for recordings not yet inserted, yet you listened to them)
  • Being able to create raw recording data for playlists. Brainzplayer shouldn’t struggle much as it should only needs the title + artist and soon release. Although the playlist json format will need to change

It would help make LB the central hub of all thing listening. Which is definitely needed as all plateforms all love their exclusive content

323

Can the messy shizzle contain more then just the name & artist? Like album, apple id stuff,…anything remotely relavent that could help?

Or is it just artist + title?

324

What do you mean by messy shizzle?
Listens can have arbitrary data in them, so you can put anything you want. However mapping to a MB recording only take title, artist, and release group.

Brainzplayer require way less to play a track.

325

Probably referring to MessyBrainz which is a term used to explain how ListenBrainz handles listens wherein the metadata is not enough to match against an existing MusicBrainz entry.

@sanojjonas if you click on the elipsis next to an unmatched listen, and choose Inspect Listen that will reveal what has been captured in MessyBrainz (developers please correct me if I am wrong on this).

For example for me:

{
  "inserted_at": 1734989054,
  "listened_at": 1734988987,
  "recording_msid": "bd248316-d5a8-4768-ae55-6ac87b7a3d75",
  "track_metadata": {
    "additional_info": {
      "artist_names": [
        "Emperor"
      ],
      "discnumber": 1,
      "duration_ms": 270966,
      "isrc": "GBVPL2400068",
      "music_service": "spotify.com",
      "origin_url": "https://open.spotify.com/track/1XBBDRJkw5eQOS7uz3pG3z",
      "recording_msid": "bd248316-d5a8-4768-ae55-6ac87b7a3d75",
      "release_artist_name": "Emperor",
      "release_artist_names": [
        "Emperor"
      ],
      "spotify_album_artist_ids": [
        "https://open.spotify.com/artist/0qpokmnvq1MOYl954iVq7x"
      ],
      "spotify_album_id": "https://open.spotify.com/album/4W6cS3ssXi1Wp04RvkiaOy",
      "spotify_artist_ids": [
        "https://open.spotify.com/artist/0qpokmnvq1MOYl954iVq7x"
      ],
      "spotify_id": "https://open.spotify.com/track/1XBBDRJkw5eQOS7uz3pG3z",
      "submission_client": "listenbrainz",
      "tracknumber": 1
    },
    "artist_name": "Emperor",
    "release_name": "Jealousy",
    "track_name": "Jealousy"
  },
  "user_name": "sound.and.vision"
}
2 Likes