[Librefm-discuss] New client for hardware streamers. And a lot of rambling.

[Vincent]

Hello,

New member here.

I have been a user of Last FM for quite some many years. Fed up that my 
hardware audiostreamers did not have built-in Last.FM support, I started 
writing my own scrobbler that will run 24/7 on my Raspberry pi and monitor my 
players (BlueSound and Yamaha MusicCast) and scrobble to Last FM. While doing 
some research I came across Libre FM and GNU FM and wrote my scrobbler with 
support for all three sites in mind. Therefore I did not have to hack support 
in for Libre and GNU FM, but have proper support from day one. The program can 
therefore scrobble to multiple services at once as well.

My scrobbler is still in development phase, so not ready for public consumption 
yet. Progress can be followed on 
https://github.com/vvdleun/audiostreamerscrobbler/ 

Right now only BlueSound support is implemented, once the scrobbling part is 
stable (and the program can cope with errors that occur while scrobbling), I 
will  continue with MusicCast and MusicBrainz support.

I have made a Pull Request on https://github.com/foocorp/gnu-fm to add my (made 
up) API key and program name to GNU FM (and hopefully Libre FM).

I've seen that Libre FM and GNU FM have not been updated for some time now, 
which is a bummer, especially now ListenBrainz is gaining attraction. I suppose 
one of the main differences with MusicBrainz is that Libre FM will not provide 
the listener's data dumps to others? Since their server can be run locally as 
well, it could be a fun idea to add MusicBraiz' API to Libre.FM and GNU FM, as 
more scrobblers may get a custom URL field in their configuration files to 
connect to custom  MusicBrainz server installations. No idea whether that would 
be ethical, though ;-)

Unfortunately PHP is not a language that I personally enjoy working in, so I 
don't know what I can do to help the projects, but I'll keep my eyes open. This 
is not criticism to the current developers, just a personal opinion. On the 
other hand, if there are simple things to do, I could see what i can do. I 
think I've seen a request to have an option to list loved tracks, that should 
be doable.

I have some plans for my own "micro" scrobbler services for single-user on 
Raspberry pi devices (with harddrive attached, to not destroy the SD card), 
which will be API-driven and have no front-end of its own. The idea is that I 
could easily create some simple dashboards, etc., on other devices. Just a 
dream now though, no idea if this would work in practice ;-)

Anyways, as I enjoy using both GNU FM and Libre FM, and will continue to use 
them, I'll make a small donation to the Libre FM project as a token of thanks.

Best regards,
Vincent