Thank you!
I completely agree, the recommendation/discovery aspect is probably the most important part of platforms like Last.fm.
Right now Rocksky is still relatively early and most recommendations are based on listening similarity/social data rather than heavy AI models. The nice thing with ATProto is that the social graph and listening history are open, which makes it possible to experiment with different recommendation approaches.
There's definitely still a lot of work to do there.
Mostly yes, but with one important detail.
Rocksky has a minimal ListenBrainz-compatible API, so duplicating the ListenBrainz integration and pointing it to the Rocksky endpoint should work for basic auth + submit/scrobble.
The current limitation is that Rocksky doesn't implement the full ListenBrainz API yet, so anything beyond auth + submitting listens may not work the same way.
I'm trying to keep this path as simple as possible because compatibility with existing scrobblers is important for adoption.
That's fair honestly,
"Scrobbling" is such an old Last.fm-era term that people already in that ecosystem forget it sounds weird to everyone else.
In practice it just means automatically tracking the music you listen to (songs, artists, albums, listening history, stats, recommendations, etc.).
I should probably explain that more clearly on the repo/site.
Rocksky itself isn't a streaming service, it tracks what you listen to from other apps/services and builds discovery/social features arround that listening history.
OAuth is possible, but the tricky part is not really the auth flow, it's the client-side ATProto write logic.
To scrobble properly, the client needs to keep enough historical scrobble state to avoid duplicates, and Rocksky doesn't only publish a scrobble record. It may also need to publish related records like artist, album, and track metadata.
So I'd like to make the integration easier, but it needs a bit more than "just OAuth".
Thank you!
Last.fm was a huge inspiration for Rocksky. I still think scrobbling and social listening are some of the best ways to discover music. Hoping to bring a more open and modern approach to it with ATProto.
If you can a find a way of A) getting live scrobbles from Last.fm into Rocksky without having to change the clients that are all using Last.fm already and/or B) get historical scrobbles out of Last.fm into Rocksky, I'd think you could potentially take over the ecosystem relatively quickly :)
> Rocksky is a decentralized, open-source music tracking and discovery platform built on the AT Protocol. It works like Last.fm but publishes your listening history directly to your Bluesky account.
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Can we start a trend where we tell people what the thing is and what it does without making them dig around to find it?
I don't use Bluesky and don't plan to start. Rocksky really isn't for me.
While it's not like it was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard,' this whole experience could have been concluded a lot faster if the project page simply described the function of the thing in a forthright fashion.
I thought "A decentralized music tracking and discovery platform" and the features list was plenty descriptive. I don't think you have to use Bluesky to use this, I think Bluesky is like the backend, and otherwise it's a Last.fm alternative?
And that's kind of my point: The description of what the thing does is so brief that neither of us can figure it out.
Afterward, there's a ton of instruction on how to install it. Including a link to use it on...someone else's sandbox, I guess? Which sure is neat and that may be a platform that I want to play with for my own purposes, but... the point isn't a sandbox, is it?
Or is that the point? Who could tell?
Anyway, I'm not installing new-to-me software that is so detrimentally-vague about what it is actually meant to do as this is.
(I mean: I already know about last.fm -- I've known about last.fm for decades now and even used to give them a few dollars every month. I still don't know what this thing is supposed to be, or why it exists, or what real advantages it might have. I strongly suspect that it could all be summarized very well in one or two decently-written paragraphs, and it seems very lazy to not simply write them.)
Instead of a line by line command copypaste, they really could have used a single post where users can just copy the commands and paste the set to terminal.
Funny timing, I'm actually working on my own scrobbling platform too: Rocksky https://rocksky.app .
It's built on the AT Protocol and focuses both on listening stats and social/discovery features, while still staying open and developer-friendly. Still very actively developed, but if you're interested I'd love to hear feedback from longtime scrobbler users
they're at different layers. libmpv is a full media player: demuxing, decoding (via FFmpeg), DSP, output. cpal is just a thin cross-platform PCM sink on top of CoreAudio/ALSA/WASAPI/etc.
Rockbox already brings its own decoders (20+ codecs), its own DSP chain (crossfeed, EQ, replaygain, gapless), and its own mixer. I just need the host OS to accept PCM frames. cpal is the minimal portable shim for that; pulling in libmpv would mean discarding Rockbox's audio pipeline and replacing it with FFmpeg's, which would basically defeat the point of building on Rockbox firmware.
Honestly, mostly for fun and love of Rockbox, I've wanted it on my desktop since 2010 and nobody else was going to build it :)
That said, Rockbox does bring real things: a battle-tested DSP chain (crossfeed, EQ, replaygain, dithering), gapless playback that actually works everywhere, codec coverage most players have given up on (Musepack, WavPack, ...). It's a lot of mature work to throw away.
Thanks for the reply! I hope the question didn't come off as snarky... I find music players, as a genre of software if you may me, fascinating. Since there is always a new one around the corner... Remember XMMS2!? And people still use Winamp 2.xx... It is fun to always see new takes on this problem. I will give it a whirl!
Author here. The real motivation: I've been a Rockbox fan since 2010, when I installed it on my iPod and it completely changed what that device could do. The UI, the codec support, the sheer hackability, nothing else has come close since.
I've wanted that same experience on my desktop for years. So I'm basically trying to bring Rockbox to macOS and Linux as a daemon I can use every day, with MPD-style control on top.
