The battle with music RSS
This post has been brought to you by the “How's this for an open-source software review?” department.
A few weeks ago, I had another go at sorting my musical library. My workflow for this is quite simple: download the music files, change metadata with MusicBrainz Picard, and use a homemade script to organize musics based on metadata. Playlist management was made using the Strawberry music player.
Note: I have now set up MusicBrainz Picard to organize my library automatically, instead of using my homemade script. I don't know if this is a recent feature, but I don't remember Picard being able to do this before.
Although I'm quite happy with this workflow, there's a major problem that comes before the download step: I don't have a way to track new releases!
You're starting to know me, I'm a big fan of RSS feeds, and a big hater of having an uncountable number of accounts on non-open source websites. However, the most popular and complete services, i.e., Spotify and Deezer, do not provide RSS feeds, and creating an account for this purpose is completely out of question.
I could always use YouTube channel feeds, but artists don't publish all their songs on YouTube, and albums are usually not categorized as releases either, so how can we use RSS (or other open-source software) to get new music releases?
Well, the answer I've found is “nothing much”. There exist a few promising solutions, but they either not work or feel really clunky.
First of all, related to MusicBrainz, there is ListenBrainz. It seems to contain the newest releases per artist, but I didn't find a way to follow each artist independently.
Second, I found a piece of software named Lidarr. Although it seemed good at first, I quickly hit configuration problems because the software is largely overfeatured for what I want.
Finally, I found a website that allows the construction of RSS feeds from Deezer: releasefeed.elomatreb.eu. I see this as a workaround rather than a true solution, but at least it works as I want. I imagine that it polls Deezer website behind the scenes.
Similarly, there exists RSS Bridge that seems to allow to construct RSS feeds from Spotify, but the configuration isn't straightforward. I didn't really experiment with it, so if you have, feel free to reach out and give your feedback!
So to conclude, damn Spotify, Deezer, and other services for not allowing RSS feeds to artists pages (or any other page for that matter).
Thank you for reading. Reach me for further discussion and updates!