Setting up a Personal Music Tracking Dashboard

Prerequisites

i always wanted my own music tracking dashboard, and now that i have my own vps, what better time to set it up than now. after a quick search, i found 2 projects that were perfect for this:

• multi-scrobbler: a tool that scrobbles (records) your listening history to multiple services
• maloja: a self-hosted music scrobbling service and statistics generator

i'm going to go the classic way of setting up services in my vps, which is caddy with docker. caddy setup should be straightforward: reverse proxy the ports to subdomains, and set up a records to point to the ip address of vps.

there is one more step left, which is to create a spotify client id (as an app), so that maloja and multi-scrobbler have access to spotify (maloja only needs it for the spotify cover art). you can create this through their dashboard. important thing to mention here is the callback url. make sure it is https://<multi-scrobbler-domain>.<ext>/callback. take note of the client id and secret, and verify if web api is checked in the settings.

import - maloja

to import past spotify data into maloja, you need to follow these steps:

• request your privacy data to have access to your history since the creation of the account: privacy
• choose the extended streaming history method (it will take up to 30 days)

• the zip file will have contents like this:

.
├── ReadMeFirst_ExtendedStreamingHistory.pdf
├── Streaming_History_Audio_2020-2021_0.json
├── Streaming_History_Audio_2021_1.json
├── Streaming_History_Audio_2021-2022_2.json
├── Streaming_History_Audio_2022-2023_5.json
├── Streaming_History_Audio_2022_3.json
├── Streaming_History_Audio_2022_4.json
├── Streaming_History_Audio_2023-2024_7.json
├── Streaming_History_Audio_2023_6.json
├── Streaming_History_Audio_2024_8.json
└── Streaming_History_Video_2022-2024.json

move these files to some folder (like 'history')

• run the following command

docker run -it --entrypoint sh -v $PWD/data:/data -e MALOJA_DATA_DIRECTORY=/data krateng/maloja
cd /data
maloja import history/Streaming_History_Audio_2020-2021_0.json

and then press y if it asks to import all files. your data should be imported now.

deployment

use the following docker-compose.yml, make sure to use the client id and secrets we had before. we cannot use multiscrobbler yet, because we need the maloja api key, which will be available in the maloja admin dashboard

services:
  maloja:
    image: "krateng/maloja:latest"
    ports:
    - "8095:42010"
    volumes:
    - "$PWD/data:/data"
    environment:
    - "MALOJA_SPOTIFY_API_ID=<client_id>"
    - "MALOJA_SPOTIFY_API_SECRET=<client_secret>"
    - "MALOJA_FORCE_PASSWORD=<admin_password>"
    - "MALOJA_DATA_DIRECTORY=/data"
    - PUID=1000
    - PGID=1000
    networks:
    - maloja_network
  multi-scrobbler:
      image: foxxmd/multi-scrobbler:develop
      container_name: multi-scrobbler
      ports:
      - "9078:9078"
      environment:
        - TZ=Asia/Colombo # Specify timezone from TZ Database name found here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones
        - SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID=<client_id>
        - SPOTIFY_CLIENT_SECRET=<client_secret>
        - MALOJA_URL=http://maloja:42010
        - MALOJA_API_KEY=<maloja_key>
        - PUID=1000
        - PGID=1000
        - BASE_URL=<dashboard_url> # https://multiscrobbler.example.com
      volumes:
        - "$PWD/multi-scrobbler:/config"
      networks:
      - maloja_network
      restart: unless-stopped

networks:
  maloja_network:
    driver: bridge

after this, everything should work good, check the multiscrobbler dashboard to see both server and client work fine

results!

the dashboard should show connected/polling for spotify. make sure to reauthenticate if it shows something else.

and finally, maloja! first things first, let's show the actual page (hopefully it isn't down by the time you read this): landing page

you might need to look and the admin dashboard and change some settings to your liking. one major annoyance is the extremely slow loading of images, but i believe that's a third-party limitation. maybe we'll tackle it another day.