Building a Vinyl Scrobbler (1 of ?)

I started using Last.fm in 2006 to log the songs I listened to, and was so in love with the data aggregation I'd write "what I listened to this year" posts to close out each year (like this one). For almost as long, I'd been wanting a way to auto-log the records I listened to - I dreamed of making the time to learn about and play with Shazam's API to get a version of vinyl scrobbling working. Fast forward twenty years, a lot of experimenting with Claude Code, and a successful personal project (also music related: a search bar for metal bands), and I finally got to work. I know vinyl scrobblers have been built a few times by now (like here, here, and here), but figuring out my options and building one very personal to me has been most of the fun.

After some time researching, I had three broad options:

1. Log via audio recognition: So, turns out Shazam doesn't actually have an API, but there are similar APIs I could have either hooked up to an always-on mic, or trigger by pressing a button, holding my phone near the speaker, and waiting for match. I didn't like either option - creepy or too many steps, respectively - so this one was out pretty quickly.
2. Log via sensors: Waving a record by a sensor could log an album as I put it on. This one would feel the most magical, but would involve putting an NFC chip in every single jacket of my (now medium-sized) collection, which would take hours of setup time.
3. Log via barcode: The most physically clunky, but fit my most immediate need - start scrobbling quickly. As I tweak the setup, I could continue scrobbling and invest in the NFC solution in the longer term.

Aside - I have to give a shout to this very cool "year in music" writeup I found in my research. I found it via one of the open source projects - Vinyl Scanner - that one goes the NFC route, complete with a microcontroller built into a custom "now listening" shelf, for the ultimate magic scrobbling experience. The repo even includes instructions/schematic for building the shelf!

Ok, onto the proof of concept. My plan is to scan the barcode on a record when I take it out to spin, and a Raspberry Pi will look up a match from my Discogs collection, and log the album into an Airtable database.

I also wanted to build a search UI for manual lookup, in case I had a record with no barcode (many of my old 7-inches), or for some reason it didn't find a match. I also wanted to start using it while all my hardware was still arriving, so I started with the software-first.

I added another feature to the flow: My favorite Discogs app feature is the randomizer - shake your phone and it shows you a random item from your collection to put on (I use this all the time to be reminded of records I don't typically reach for). I decided to build this feature right into the lookup UI, so I could randomize and scrobble in just two clicks.

The magical part happened when I loaded the collection UI from my localhost - I wasn't convinced I needed to fetch album art for everything I owned as Claude Code suggested, but when I loaded the page, I gasped out loud when I saw all my records in a grid, staring back at me. Truly a magical moment.

And so far, it works! I've been scrobbling vinyl all weekend.

So excited to start doing my own Wrapped-style analysis on my vinyl habits - either manually like I used to with Last.fm, or by throwing the data into a tool like Hex to see what patterns it notices.

Part 2 to come when I get the hardware hooked up - it's finally arrived (I can't wait to share the Pi case I found), and I'll hopefully work on it in the next week or two. 

Twelve Records

The fact that I am stubborn is why I get through weird experimental projects that end up being torturous. So to break things up a little, I will now tell you about a project in which I failed. I don't think I mind too much, though, because it was fun while it lasted (read: not torturous).

Last January, I did something I had been wanting to do for a long time: I bought a record player. One of those suitcase types that comes with a USB cable for digital conversion. I only allowed myself to buy it on one condition: to temper the danger that I would end up spending all of my money on records, I would only be allowed one record a month.


What this ended up doing was that I put a lot of thought into which one I would buy each time, combing through every single one at my local record store (sometimes many times in that month) to find the perfect one. It became a carefully thought-out ritual rather than an impulsive one. I took everything into account, too – not only the music, but also the cover art (more to inspect and notice on such a big sleeve), the mood I was in at the time, the weather outside, what I had just eaten, what I was thinking about that day.

– Aside: There is a one second shot in The Crow where the girl (Sarah) sifts through her records in a crate, several rings on her fingers. I think about that every time I look through records; it almost looks like she is playing piano. –


I started noticing a habit: each time, I would put the record on my bed and take a picture of it. So I started throwing them into a set and thinking that they might look good as a 2009 calendar. Eventually I kind of abandoned that idea because I wasn't bouncing-off-the-walls-excited about it; I actually never decided what I would do with the pictures, or even if the pictures were my intended end product of this whole thing.


Anyway, here is where I failed: I didn't buy twelve records... I missed September and October. This is for two reasons: 1] I got three albums on vinyl for my birthday in September, which took up a lot of beautiful listening time for a while; 2] I wasn't inspired enough during the 4 or 5 times I went into the record store in those two months. I was really beating myself up about this failure until I thought back to last January; I remembered that I initially had the "one a month" idea so I could save money. So why spend money on a record just to fill a quota, when I may not even adore it?


Even still, I would have really liked to follow through on this project and have a complete 12 records that would be reflective of my year of careful vinyl consideration. It's okay, though, I love the ones I ended up with, and I'm also delighted to see that these pictures represent a kind of gestalt-y snapshot of what my life was like at various points of 2008.