Scrobbling Music Like a Dumb Zoomer

It’s been a while since I last updated my “blog” so here is a short one.

I had a home server whose job is only for running a remote MPD instance and acquiring some Linux ISOs. Last month, I got a new hardware to replace that old sad server. The hardware is nothing crazy, but I wanted to replace the old one just because I could, I guess. Since I’ve been listening to music using that MPD instance, and since I’m a zoomer, I wanted to track it; scrobble it.

One software that I ran across is Multi-Scrobbler. It can scrobble music from many sources (at the same time) from normalfriend-friendly platforms (Spotify, YouTube Music) to hipster ones such as Subsonic-compatible APIs, MPRIS, Mopidy, and MPD. The destination to which the tracked music is published ranges from Last.fm, ListenBrainz, to a self-hostable scrobble database called Maloja which I decided to use.

MPD

rmpc playing "au revoir" by Malice Mizer from a remote MPD instance

The “original” MPD instance are on the server and so are the music files, which are served via NFS. There is also an “actual” MPD instance and an MPD client on my desktop from which I listened the music.

“Uhh, why are there two MPD instances? What is the remote MPD instance for? Why don’t you just set the music directory to the mounted NFS folder?”

Because the music files are on the server, I want the database to be there as well. I think it’s more convenient to keep the two together. The server-side MPD instance creates and updates the database and the desktop-side one only uses it. Here is an excerpt of my desktop-side MPD config, ~/.config/mpd/mpd.conf, in which I used the proxy plugin:¹

music_directory "/mnt/network/music"
database {
       plugin "proxy"
       host "192.168.12.69"
       port "6600"
}

Besides, I’m not sure if I could use an MPD client on my desktop and point it directly to the server-side MPD instance. I couldn’t make it work. My current setup just works™.

Oh, the MPD client is a random software I found on the AUR called rmpc.

Multi-Scrobbler

Multi-Scrobbler dashboard, or whatever it is called.

Now, Multi-Scrobbler runs locally on my desktop since rmpc actually listens to the local (desktop-side) MPD instance. This might be slightly confusing, but again, the supposedly straightforward method of using MPD remotely didn’t work for me.

There are some cool things we can do using Multi-Scrobble. For instance, we can modify scrobble data, e.g., titles, artists, albums, using regex before sending them to Maloja. It’s also possible to scrobble from multiple sources to multiple destinations (even multiple Maloja instances), as previously mentioned. However, my use case is simple.

Maloja

Maloja web app; this literal zoomer only listen to the same guy over and over.

This one serves a web app that can be exposed to the Internet, so I need it to run on the server. I tunnel my home server to a VPS using Wireguard so that I can run Maloja behind a reverse proxy. You can visit the web app on outsider.rodeo, which might be subject to changes.

That’s it, I guess.