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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. |