Libre.fm blog

In general I advise you to stay offline on April 1st.

The increasingly corporate web marketing teams will try and do something and it'll probably be awful. I remember occasionally things used to be good on April 1st, but in recent times (the last 16 years or so) they haven't been great.

That said, 16 years ago today I put out the call for Libre.fm and development began that same day.

A few weeks earlier I'd suggested what would become Libre.fm at a conference I was organizing in Boston. If you were there, maybe you'll remember it better if I say "free money guy" – this was one of those times you really did have to be there.

Looking at the early users who registered, I'm pleased to say there are lots of people I recognize, some I even talk to on a daily basis 16 years later.

Whether you've been a user for 16 years or 16 minutes, thank you for using Libre.fm.

What's new?

Since the last post at the start of February a lot has changed.

Album art

Perhaps the most obvious change is that we're now showing album art in a lot more places. I forget what even got me thinking about this in the first place, but when I started looking into it I remembered all the previous effort that had gone into making album art work. I have a very strong belief in the power of the web and that we should use public APIs and services where possible. This is why even now 16 years later, you cannot upload anything to Libre.fm.

Instead of uploading things and dealing with all the headaches and expenses that will bring, I prefer to link to things which already exist. In terms of album art, that is the Cover Art Archive, a project of MusicBrainz and the Internet Archive. The vast majority of albums ever made are in the MusicBrainz database, alongside artists and even individuals who are in bands.

For example, 1dcbfbbc-1581-4cfc-b16c-24f22b579ec1 refers to Nigel Blackwell, lyricist/singer/lead guitarist of Half Man Half Biscuit (10eb06ab-0695-4057-97a5-bea9eeb6fb6d) and their first album, Back in the DHSS (e2b5a5c2-80ab-3bdf-8a5e-e48d46bd3618). That last one is special, because if you know the MusicBrainz ID for an album, you can probably get the album art for it:

https://coverartarchive.org/release-group/e2b5a5c2-80ab-3bdf-8a5e-e48d46bd3618/front-small

And the good news is... we have lots and lots of albums where we already know the MusicBrainz ID for the album, and if we don't know it... we can look it up via the wonderful MusicBrainz API.

Now we have album art on the artist pages, on the album pages and even on individual scrobbles (we have to try and figure it out here, not always with perfect luck).

Sharing updates

Something else I've been working on is giving you more ways to share what you've listened to with other people. Libre.fm has a lot of data so I think about the enormous number of new URLs we're putting into the web when I add things like this.

A few months ago, I added the ability to link to any scrobble ever for any user. For example, the music I'm listening to as I write this:

https://libre.fm/user/mattl/scrobble/1743544384

But what if you wanted to embed that scrobble into a website, for example the Libre.fm blog?

https://libre.fm/user/mattl/scrobble/1743544384/embed

Clearly there's some more work to be done there. I added two new versions: images and plain text.

Image:

Plain text:

mattl https://libre.fm/user/mattl

Listened to Mathematically Safe by Half Man Half Biscuit on Trouble over Bridgewater

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 21:53:04 +0000

I'd encourage you all to suggest ideas for alternative formats, but they're all linked from any scrobble page. Just head to your profile and you'll see your list of recently played tracks. Each of these directly links to the individual scrobble now and from there all of these formats is available to you.

Third and final thing, performance

Libre.fm can be a little slow at times, we've all seen it. I feel it more than others sometimes when I'm working on adding things and pages take a little longer than normal to load. To solve this, I've employed some rudimentary but effective caching.

User profile pages are cached for 4 minutes, other things are cached for different amounts of time (some are cached for a year!)

I invite your feedback on that too.

Where will you go to give all this feedback, you're possibly wondering? We have a new Discussions tab on GitHub. This takes discussions out of the issue tracker and into a more refined place. I invite you to come join in, say hello and give your feedback. You can see the things I'm going to work on this month there too.

UK Online Safety Act (which I keep calling a Bill)

Libre.fm is hosted in the UK by the good people at Bytemark Hosting. I first met the founders Matthew and Peter when I signed up for a Bytemark account way back in 2004. Since then I've been lucky enough to work with them on various projects both in my spare time and in my day jobs. Bytemark has always been very good about hosting community projects including Debian, OpenStreetMap and.. me.

A few years ago Bytemark was sold and the new owners have continued to give completely free of charge hosting every month to Libre.fm. Without this it would have been very difficult to keep the site running at all, let alone at the size it is now.

Huge thank you to Bytemark (especially Matthew, Peter and Patrick) and the staff at IOMart for continuing to put up with us.

Being hosted in the UK and having a (presumably) large enough UK user base, I've been following Neil Brown on Mastodon talking about the upcoming UK Online Safety Act and the implications for community websites.

As such we now have a formalized terms and conditions and privacy policy for Libre.fm – I encourage you to read them, and please let me know if you have any questions, and huge thanks to Neil for all the work he has done on this. Neil is not our lawyer, and didn't provide us with any legal advice, just an excellent website and some helpful pointers when I ask silly questions on Mastodon (which is most of the time, let's face it)

One final piece of news

After over 6 and a half years at my day job, I was laid off a few weeks ago. I've been dealing with all the fun that comes from that, filing paperwork to keep the health insurance for my wife and I, filing for unemployment benefits so we can keep paying rent while looking for a new job, etc etc.

If you're looking for someone who has spent virtually their entire life doing stuff with the web, including 27 years of professional experience. Please get in touch. I'm working on revising my resume and getting all that stuff together right now, but I've also found that human connections are the best thing out there. I will miss my old job, but some of my former colleagues are Libre.fm users too.

In an effort to start spreading the word, on Friday to celebrate #FediDonutFriday I put out a nice photo of my donut, my WebObjects book and a couple miniatures holding up my business card. You can see all of that over on my Mastodon profile.

Finally, some numbers.

• 379,641 people have listened to 311,652,209 songs.
• (52,015 songs were in the last 24 hours!)