cum mortuis in lingua mortua

Tracking music listening habits doesn't need to be hard. My local radio station RTRFM publishes playlists for most of its shows (subject to the presenter's interest in doing so of course - most of them are volunteers after all). It's trivial to copy-paste these into an Emacs Lisp interpreter, making everything possible.

A quick fork of listenbrainz.el and a few updates to its code later, we've got a tool to submit a playlist of a show we've listened to. In a Lisp dialect even, rumours of the language's demise notwithstanding.

First we adjust the time the tracks were originally aired to the time we're listening to the show - re-streaming is possible for some weeks after the original air date.

(setq starttime (date-to-time "Sat 25 Jan 2025 15:10"))

We're grabbing the playlist from an org mode headline and put each line in a list (of course).

(setq playlist (let ((playlist
                      (save-excursion
                        (goto-char (search-forward "Playlist data" nil t))
                        (let ((el (org-element-at-point-no-context)))
                          (split-string
                           (buffer-substring-no-properties
                            (org-element-property :contents-begin el)
                            (org-element-property :contents-end el))
                           "\n")))))
                 playlist))

And next we can parse and submit our listens. The data is provided in groups of 3 lines, with the first line the relative time in HH:MM after the show started, the second the track title and the third line the performer. I've included a basic rate limit of 30 calls per minute to not overload the ListenBrainz servers.

(while playlist
  (let* ((songrelstart (split-string (pop playlist) ":"))
         (starthour (string-to-number (pop songrelstart)))
         (startminute (string-to-number (pop songrelstart)))
         (songrelstartf (format-time-string "%F %R" (time-add starttime (* (+ (* starthour 60) startminute) 60))))
         (title (pop playlist))
         (performer (pop playlist)))
    (progn
      (listenbrainz-submit-historic-listen performer title (listenbrainz-timestamp (date-to-time songrelstartf)))
      (sleep-for 2))))