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ListenBrainz All the Things

In the last two episodes of The Bootloader, I've covered Parachord, the cross-platform music player, and Achordion, it's accompanying music commuity. Achordion is built on top of ListenBrainz, which, per its website, keeps track of the music you listen to and provides insights into your listening habits. Looking at various ListenBrainz tools, I ended up creating (or re-creating) my own, with some help from Claude.

ListenBrainz Widget

For the last few years, I've maintained a Now Spinning page, which I update monthly with the records that are on the turntable. ListenBrainz offers a widget you can embed in a web page, but I wanted something a little more stylish to add to my Now Spinning page. That led me to create listenbrainz-widget. It includes two widgets, the first being a "Now Playing" widget that I've embedded on my Now Spinning page that looks like this:

Now Playing widget featuring Metric

Using GitHub Pages, you host the HTML there and then you can embed it on any web page.

The second widget is a "Top 5 Albums" image generator that you can then share on social media. It creates a 1200x1200 PNG of the top five albums you listened to based on the data range you choose.

I even created a cool landing page for the widgets. The README in the repository has all the details on how to install and run it.

Top 5 albums of the week

listenbrainz-autoposter

Inspired by the scrobble-blue project, listenbrainz-autoposter posts your top 5 album listens from the previous week to Bluesky and / or Mastodon. This uses GitHub Actions to automate the widget above instead of Cloudflare, like the original project.

I have it set to share my top every Tuesday, giving ListenBrainz enough time to process the previous week.

listenbrainz-to-bluesky

Another project inspired by someone else, this time it is again scrobble-blue by Will Manduffy. listenbrainz-to-bluesky adds one line to your Bluesky profile with a "Listening to" and the name of the song and the artist of your most recent scrobble. This one is self-hosted and runs via a cron job every few minutes.

Paul's Bluesky Profile showing Listening to: Alright Hear This by Beastie Boys

Too much oversharing? Probably, but I know a few folks have liked some of the music recommendations, so I'm going to share for now.