Tag: music

ListenBrainz – Track Your Listens

Post author By Pete Prodoehl
Post date 2026-03-02
No Comments on ListenBrainz – Track Your Listens

This post is about ListenBrainz but we need to start with the Last.fm service. So 20 years ago I learned about Last.fm as a way to track my listening habits. I listen to a lot of music, mostly using a computer. I would run this “Audioscrobbler” program to send what I listened to over to Last.fm and you’d see it at https://www.last.fm/user/rasterweb

This was all super cool, except for one thing. I saw too many services shut down over the years and I did not want to lose my data, so in 2010 I created Heard – a Last.fm mirror, which is still running on this site.

Fast forward to 2025 and I’m using Jellyfin to listen to all my music. Jellyfin has a plugin to send data to Last.fm so all good! Except… remember that Last.fm is owned by CBS Interactive, and you know what? Fuck those guys.

Right now I am still sending my data to Last.fm but that will stop soon. I now use ListenBrainz, which is basically the open alternative to Last.fm and you can see my listens at https://listenbrainz.org/user/raster/

ListenBrainz is run by MetaBrainz, and organization which actually has a Social Contract you can read. Because of this I’ve also chosen to support them financially. When possible I’d prefer to pay for services from the good folks than get free stuff from the bad folks. (The bad folks will just use your data against you/for profit anyway.)

Also, there is a ListenBrainz plugin for Jellyfin so that’s all working fine, and there is a Last.fm compatible API for ListenBrainz so I should be able to update heard to work with it.

And yeah, heard was moved from GitHub to Codeberg because Fuck GitHub, Fuck Microsoft, and Fuck their AI Slop.

And also yeah, the ListenBrainz code repository is still on GitHub because you cannot win every battle. Sigh…

One more “Also” here! I do know about libre.fm but I had a heck of a time / wait getting an account set up so I’m behind on that but will still investigate it. (Dammit! GitHub again!)

Tags jellyfin, music, open, web

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Bandwagon.fm Music

If you saw my previous post about Bandcamp you might know that it’s a good place for people to put their music. Of course Bandcamp has issues, so we still need alternatives, or at least additional outlets/options.

Take a look at Bandwagon.fm now. It’s “Better Social for Musicians” and “Connect to Your Fans on the Fediverse” which might be confusing if you don’t know what the Fediverse is. Read the About page for the full version, but the short version is that it’s a way to be free of the corporate media sites like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. But how can I trust these Bandwagon.fm folks to run a reliable web site? Well, you can run your own site if you want, it’s all open source.

So you can just put your music up on Bandwagon.fm, but what about the Fediverse part and connecting with fans? Okay, my site is at bandwagon.fm/@rasterweb and my account is @rasterweb@bandwagon.fm and you can follow that account with any Fediverse account. Mastodon, Pixelfed, or any site that uses the ActivityPub protocol.

For my masotodon.social account I can follow myself here: https://mastodon.social/@rasterweb@bandwagon.fm

When I (@rasterweb@bandwagon.fm) release new music or post a news update I (@rasterweb@mastodon.social) can see it in my Mastodon feed.

But maybe you’re like “ActivityPub sucks! I just use RSS!” and that’s okay… we got you covered because like other ActivityPub sites they provide an RSS feed. Here’s mine: https://bandwagon.fm/@69847667e6ff0fb4436fb821/feed?format=rss

Pop that URL in your feed reader (I like NetNewsWire paired with FreshRSS) and you can follow along and see all the updates.

And RSS is powerful! You can transform it into an email newsletter or do other weird things.

Basically if you are a musician, a band, or put music online, I think it’s worth looking at what Bandwagon.fm is doing. It’s interesting stuff and could be the way out of corporate social media with all the evil shit their platforms give us. Imagine connecting directly with your fans and cutting out the advertisements, the algorithms, and the bullshit.

This is the IndieWeb we all need to build, together.

Tags bandwagonfm, indieweb, music, web

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Bandcamp Music

I finally got around to getting all of my recent (meaning since 2008) albums onto Bandcamp. You can find it all at peteprodoehl.bandcamp.com

If you’re a fan of the weird stuff I make, check it out! The music I create is nothing amazing, but I have fun doing it.

Bandcamp seems okay right now, though they’ve had a few issues in the past. It’s a site I use to find and purchase music. It’s probably my number one choice right now for supporting artists by buying their music, Bandcamp Fridays are still a thing (for now):

Bandcamp Fridays—on which we waive our revenue share and pass the funds directly to artists & labels—has resulted in millions of fans paying over $120 million directly to labels and musicians they love.

2026 has these dates scheduled:

March 6th, 2026
May 1st, 2026
August 7th, 2026
September 4th, 2026
October 2nd, 2026
November 6th, 2026
December 4th, 2026

While Bandcamp is pretty good, I get the feeling they may not be around forever, or may not be “pretty good” forever. So it’s not the only place I’ve put my music. I’ll explore that more in future posts.

Tags bandcamp, music

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The Return of RPM

Back in 2012 I figured I would take a year off from the RPM Challenge but it ended up being 14 years… Oops. We’ll, we’re back! If you’re keeping track I did it in 2008, 2009, 2011, and now in 2026. Oh, the RPM Challenge is to record and album in one month. February, to be exact.

Here’s my 2026 entry, titled Space Farts. The title comes from about 10 years ago when I was driving somewhere listening to WMSE and hearing music I could only describe as, well… Space Farts! So I used that for the title.

Wanna listen? You can hear the whole thing on Bandcamp, Bandwagon.fm, or under music.

I’ve been in pain for months now but sometimes the product of pain is art. I’ve also watched a lot of Star Trek lately, so song titles like “Eject the Warp Core”, “Shields Holding”, and “The Prime Directive” were obvious choices.

I recorded the entire album over the course of two days, with another day for cleaning up and converting files and getting it all uploaded.I used a Korg Monotron Duo going through a Korg Monotron Delay going through a Korg NTS-1. That’s it. Three tiny and cheap Korg synths chained together. Limitations are meant to push creativity, right?

I haven’t been not making music since 2011. I took a little break but in 2021/2022 I was doing DAWless Jams and Pocket Operator stuff. And it was fun. I mostly stopped because I got too busy with paying work and took over my music space with client projects.

I have no delusions this is amazing music. I mostly make it for fun and occasionally some other weirdo or insane person tells me they like it. Cool. I’ll probably keep going. See you next year!

Tags music, rpm2026, rpmchallenge

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Jellyfin for Music

I started using Jellyfin for my music library so I can access it anywhere I can get a connection to the Internet. I don’t support streaming services that charge subscriptions and I’ve spent over four decades building my music collection, and I add to it frequently.

I’ve been using Apple’s iTunes/Music/whatever it’s called now, and often copying some (or all) of my library locally to multiple devices but I thought I’d give Jellyfin a try. I know people who use it for video but I’m strictly here for the music.

A guy I work with uses Jellyfin running on his home NAS with a zillion videos files. I thought about where to get it running, but ended up just running it on my primary desktop computer. It’s already basically a server, and it’s always on (except when it kernel panics a few times a year) and since my music files were already there, it was simple. I just have it set to launch at boot.

One interesting thing about Jellyfin versus a lot of other open source projects is that they seem to have money!

So it’s been a few months (I started this post in July!) and I’ve been mostly pleased with Jellyfin. There are a few things that are annoying, but overall it’s pretty good. The annoying things are mainly stuff that is different from the old way I did things. Like there are no star ratings. I used the 0-5 star ratings a lot in iTunes/Music.app and I miss it. (A plugin could probably be written but no one has done it yet.) It does handle all my scrobbling so the data goes to Last.FM and Heard just fine.

Another nice thing about Jellyfin is that I could (in theory) share my server with others by making accounts that they could use to login and listen to my music library. I have not done this yet but it’s a nice feature for sure.

I’ll plan a follow-up post talking about clients for Jellyfin, because honestly servers are kinda boring by design (when they work well) because they just sit there and run and you shouldn’t even see them much.

Stay Tuned!

Tags music