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scrobbles
December 10th, 2021
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When Tidal first came out I jumped on it right away. I hadn't ever
used a music subscription service before and I liked the hifi idea
and also the higher artist payout rate than the competition.
I stuck with it for a few months but ultimately felt it was too
buggy and dropped it.
Fast forward to this week. I decided I've been using Plex for free
enough for several years that I should contribute financially.
I have no real reason to get Plex Pass since it doesn't actually
offer any features I felt I was missing, but what the heck. So
I picked up the life-time Plex Pass and while I'm doing it
I notice they're promoting Tidal.
It's not part of Plex Pass itself, but the Tidal subscription has
a discount and integrates with Plex. That sounded pretty solid,
and they had a 30 day trial. I figure, lets pick it up and try out
the holiday music. Maybe I'll discover new albums to join my
collection!
It was an easy setup and it's running well. I remembered that
I saw Robert Plant and Allison Krauss have another team-up album
that just came out (spotted the vinyl at the record shop on
Saturday) so I checked it out (very good, like Raising Sand before
it). I also tried out the new Tangerine Dream album (good for
background, but boring for a focused listen). Overall I've been
poking around more in an exploratory nature.
A quick aside…
I prefer to listen to music by album rather track. It's one of
a number of reasons I've never had much interest in Spotify.
I really like the arrangement of an album. How did the artists and
producers compile it together? Does it sweep through emotions or
jostle them? How did it kick off and what track is batting
clean-up? Is there a theme? There's just so much to it! I don't
buy songs; I buy albums.
But back to Tidal/Plex…
I'm clicking around trying out all this new stuff and I have
a moment of worry. You see, I don't really like subscription
services. If I can pay a one-time-fee I'm much more likely to
purchase, even if the cost seems cheaper to "rent" with a monthly
charge. Tidal's monthly fee is going to annoy me sooner or later
and I'm going to cancel it. When that happens there goes my
history of my explorations. Boo.
But wait! Scrobbles!
That's right, there's things like LastFM that let you scrobble
your plays to them so you can track them between services and
devices and get insights into your listening habits. I love that!
I have it configured for all my music players that support it on
this laptop, but I never thought about it in Plex, let alone Tidal
via Plex.
A bit of searching revealed that both Plex and Tidal have options
to link to LastFM (yes, I know there are open source alternatives
like OpenFM and I have accounts there too, but most apps are
hard-coded to support just LastFM, so I use it still). I added my
links and now my glorious Christmas binge is scrobbling. But wait,
there's a problem! I configured scrobbling for Tidal via their web
music player. Plus I can play it through Plex as a player, so one
of those two things should work, but they don't. I think it's
broken. *sniffle*
So that's sad and I feel robbed of my scrobbles. It's funny, but
it actually makes me want to use Tidal less! If it doesn't
scrobble does it even count? Haha. No, not that. It's not that
I need credit for listening. I want that data so I can reference
it later or get recommendations based on it. That's valuable to
me! Boo.
Maybe it'll get fixed soon. For now, back to Christmas.