eeclaire / artist-queue

Doing future-me a favor by tracking artists I like so that I can remind myself they exist when future-me forgets about them

I hate new music

I don't actually hate new music. I like to listen to music when I'm coding, but I prefer music I already know so that I don't get distracted by the novelty of a cool new song. Unfortunately, I often end up stuck in a rut, listening to the same 4 artists over and over.

What's great is when I remember a band or artist I loved several months ago, but that I'd since forgotten about.

The problem with that is that brains and memory don't always work how you want them to, and I can't just rememeber something I'd forgotten about on command. However, computers are pretty good at memory, if you set them up right. I decided to do future-me a favor, and keep track of what music I'm listening to using the last.fm API, where last.fm is synced up to my Spotify and YouTube accounts. The idea is to run a cronjob every hour or so to see what music I've been listening to, then push artists that I tend to listen to more than once to a queue. Every time I listen to that artist, they should get pushed back to the bottom of the queue. What should happen, is that artists that I haven't listened to in a while should bubble up to the top of that queue. If I'm ever feeling sick of listening to the same artists over and over, I should be able to pull up the top X artists in the queue - the X artists I haven't listened to in the longest time, and that presumably I've forgotten about.

Requirements

If you want to use this, you're going to need to do a little setup first:

1. Make sure you have Python3. Because of time manipulations, this setup isn't backwards compatible.
2. You're going to need to have a last.fm account. If you don't already have one, you can sign up here. Make sure you switch the 'user' field in lastfm.py to your username.
3. If you don't listen to music on last.fm directly, you're going to want to set yourself up to scrobble music to your account. This just means last.fm will capture songs you listen to on other mediums, like Spotify or Youtube, and list them in your last.fm music profile.
   • If you're using Spotify, make sure you set up scrobbling for each platform you use to listen to Spotify (mobile, desktop, web, etc...). Last.fm has instructions for each platform here
   • YouTube doesn't officially support scrobbling, but there are some browser extensions that will scrobble music from YouTube to last.fm for you listed here.
4. You'll need to install PostgreSQL and the psycopg2 library and setup up a few tables. I'll go into more detail on that here
5. Set up a cron job that will run the hourly-cron.sh script every hour or so.

PostgreSQL

Run pip install psycopg2 (use pip3 if your default python isn't python 3)
You'll need to create a local PostgreSQL database called 'artistqdb'. In that database, you should also create four tables:

scrobbles

Column	Type	Modifiers
id	integer	not null default nextval('scrobbles_id_seq'::regclass)
artist	text
song	text
scrobble_date	timestamp without time zone

artist_queue

Column	Type	Modifiers
id	integer	not null default nextval('artist_queue_id_seq'::regclass)
artist	text
last_scrobble_date	timestamp without time zone

confirmed_artists

Column	Type	Modifiers
id	integer	not null default nextval('confirmed_artists_id_seq'::regclass)
artist	text

rundaily

Column	Type	Modifiers
id	integer	not null default nextval('rundaily_id_seq'::regclass)
last_run	timestamp without time zone

Cron

Add the command that runs the query on your recent last.fm listens to your crontab. In Linux, you can do this by entering crontab -e into your terminal. I wrote a shell script called hourly-cron.sh to change directories into my current one (instead of the default home) and run the python script that queries last.fm. My crontab line to run this command every hour looks like

0 * * * * * . ~/Projects/artistQ/hourly-cron.sh