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chore: add a tool for finding Music tracks whose files have gone 
Lidarr renames an artist or album folder, music-mirror prunes the old path and
encodes the new one, and every entry in Apple Music pointing at the old path
dies. Music offers no view of those, and the exclamation mark only appears once
a track is touched.

Reads the XML from Music's own Export Library rather than asking Music itself.
A broken track makes AppleScript's `location` raise instead of returning a
value, so a bulk query dies on the first one with error -1728 and a per-track
loop costs an Apple event apiece.

Checked against a single directory walk rather than a test per file. On a
fifty-thousand-track library that is around seven thousand directory reads
instead of fifty thousand stat calls, and over SMB each of those stats is a
network round trip -- which is the difference between seconds and minutes.

Two comparisons have to be loosened or most of the library reads as missing.
macOS stores filenames decomposed while the share composes them, so the umlauts
in Motley Crue are two different byte strings depending on which side wrote the
name; both are normalised to NFC. And the share is very likely
case-insensitive, so a file is not missing because someone capitalised it
differently.

The test stage now copies tools/ as well, since the suite covers this and the
runtime image deliberately does not carry it.
2026-08-24 19:36:06 +01:00

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# music-curator
Build a local record of what actually gets listened to, from Last.fm.
Companion to [music-mirror](https://code.emmathe.dev/lyrathorpe/music-mirror),
which keeps an MP3 copy of a lossless library for an iPod. This one answers the
question that mirror cannot: which of it is worth carrying, and which of it has
not been played in years.
**This is stage three.** It ingests the scrobble history, indexes the library
from Lidarr, matches one to the other, and writes playlists into the mirror —
by listening history and by mood.
Nothing is written back to Lidarr — every call there is a `GET`. See "Where this
is going" below.
## What it does today
- Pulls the full Last.fm scrobble history into SQLite, then keeps it current.
- Tracks loved tracks separately, as the protected set for later stages.
- Indexes every artist, album and track Lidarr knows about, with file paths and
the date each file landed.
- Ties the two together and reports how well it managed.
- Writes M3U playlists into the mirror, from the listening history.
## Matching
Two tiers, and no third.
| Tier | Key | Notes |
| ------ | --------------------------- | ----------------------------------------- |
| `mbid` | MusicBrainz recording id | Exact. Last.fm's per-scrobble `mbid` against Lidarr's `ForeignRecordingId` |
| `name` | Normalised artist and title | Everything the first tier could not carry |
| `none` | — | Recorded as a miss, never guessed at |
The name tier does almost all of the work. A recording MBID is exact when it
lands, but MusicBrainz holds a separate recording per release, and Last.fm and
Lidarr rarely pick the same one: on a real library, two thirds of scrobbles
carry a recording id and barely a twentieth of them join on it. The report
counts how many carried an id and matched on name anyway, which is the measure
of that disagreement.
So the normalisation is the load-bearing part, because the two sides disagree in
predictable ways. It folds case and accents, drops guest credits (`Yellowcard
feat. Tay Jardine` against a tag of `Yellowcard`), strips a trailing
version suffix (`(Remastered 2011)`, `- Live`), expands `&`, and removes a
leading `The`. Punctuation gets two different rules that pull against each
other and are both required: apostrophes are **deleted**, so `Don't` meets
`Dont`, while every other mark becomes a **space**, so `AC/DC`, `AC-DC` and
`AC DC` all meet as well.
It leans towards collapsing too much. A false match makes something look
played; a missed match makes something look abandoned. Only one of those
deletes music.
### Indexing quirks
Albums are fetched from the **unfiltered** `GET /api/v1/album` first: one
request, and the only path that skips albums whose artist metadata is missing
rather than dereferencing it.
That is not enough on its own. Every album endpoint maps through a resource
that picks the release with `SingleOrDefault(x => x.Monitored)`, which throws
for an album with **two monitored releases** and takes the whole response with
it:
```
HTTP 500: Sequence contains more than one element
```
When the bulk call dies that way, the indexer falls back to one request per
artist. It cannot avoid the exception, but it confines it to whichever artist
owns the offending album and names them in the log — which is the only
practical way to find it in a large library. Open that artist in Lidarr and
check the Releases tab of each album: exactly one release may be monitored.
Losing an artist's albums does not cost their tracks, which come from a
different endpoint with a different mapper, so matching is unaffected. A cull
would not be, and the report says so.
### Talking to Lidarr
Indexing is two requests per artist, and more when the album fallback fires. On
a large library that is thousands of requests in a few minutes. `urllib` opens a
new TCP connection and performs a new DNS lookup for every one of them, which is
enough to exhaust a container's resolver and produce `[Errno -3] Try again` on
everything at once. The client therefore holds one connection open per host and
resolves once.
Transient failures — a dropped connection, a resolver hiccup, `429`, `502`,
`503`, `504` — are retried with a backoff. An HTTP `500` is not: it is an
unhandled exception inside Lidarr's own serialisation and will be raised again
identically. That distinction also decides whether a failure is worth
investigating; a library-wide outage is not probed artist by artist, because
doing so multiplies the load that caused it.
A local address is preferable to a public hostname here. It removes DNS, the
reverse proxy and its timeouts from a path that needs none of them.
Tracks and files have no unfiltered endpoint — Lidarr rejects a call with no
filter — so they stay per artist. If one artist cannot be served, that artist is
skipped and the run continues, but the count is recorded and the coverage report
says so loudly. A missing artist makes their played music look cold, so an
incomplete index must never be culled against.
### Reading the coverage report
Matched against unmatched is the wrong comparison — most unmatched listening is
music that was never in the library, which says nothing at all about the
matcher. The line to watch is:
```
unmatched by an artist the library holds: N pairs, M plays
```
That is a track that was played by an artist the library holds. It is then
split three ways, because owning an artist is a weak proxy for owning a track
and a shared title is a weak proxy for a shared song:
- **the library's own title credits the scrobbled artist** — `Voodoo People
(Pendulum Remix)` against a play credited to Pendulum. Same song, filed
under the original artist. These are the genuine misses.
- **the same title under an unrelated artist** — a collision, not a miss.
Across fifty thousand tracks these are constant: `Everyday` is Rusko and
also Def Leppard, `Kaleidoscope` is Delta Heavy and also Chappell Roan.
Matching on title alone would be far worse than missing them, which is why
there is no such tier.
- **the title is nowhere in the library** — never bought.
Only the first is worth chasing. Counting all three as matcher failures
overstates the problem and would over-block the cull.
## Playlists
Written into `<mirror>/_playlists/` as extended M3U, rebuilt every pass. Six
rules, capped at `--playlist-limit` tracks each:
| Playlist | Rule |
| -------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------- |
| `heavy-rotation` | Most played over the last twelve months |
| `all-time` | Most played ever |
| `neglected` | Played heavily once, silent for twelve months |
| `deep-cuts` | Never played, from albums whose other tracks you play constantly |
| `unheard-favourites` | Never played, by the artists you play most |
| `unheard` | Never played, anywhere in the library |
Ninety days was the obvious window for "recent" and is the wrong one: on a real
history it holds a few hundred plays spread thinly across a twenty-thousand
track rotation, so nothing ranks meaningfully. Twelve months does.
The two `unheard` playlists rotate **weekly**, not per pass. A pass runs every
few hours, and a playlist that reorders itself each time is one that has to be
re-imported each time — the Music app imports a snapshot of a file, it does not
track it.
### Moods
A second set of playlists selects by **Last.fm's crowd tags** rather than by
listening history. MusicBrainz genres arrive free with the Lidarr index and are
no use for this: they are sparse and formal, and will not tell you a record is
screamo or synthwave. People typing tags will.
Tags are fetched once per artist — one `artist.getTopTags` call each — and
refreshed every ninety days. `--tag-limit` spreads the first sweep over several
passes.
Artists are looked up **by name**, not by MusicBrainz id, despite Lidarr having
an id for every one of them. Last.fm's mbid index is stale and partial: it
answers "the artist you supplied could not be found" for Devo, Escape the Fate,
Blasterjaxx and a few hundred others whose pages plainly exist and carry exactly
the tags wanted. Its name index is the one its own site runs on. The id is kept
only as a fallback, for a name Lidarr spells differently.
An artist neither key resolves is recorded as fetched with no tags, so the next
pass does not spend a request on it again. A genuine failure — a rate limit, a
bad key — is *not* recorded, so that one is retried.
The built-in moods are built from the **tag distribution of this library**,
measured, rather than from a general taxonomy:
| Mood | Selected on |
| --------------- | -------------------------------------------------------- |
| `drum-and-bass` | drum and bass and its six spellings, liquid funk, neurofunk, jungle, techstep, hospital records |
| `bass` | dubstep, brostep, grime, trip-hop, big beat |
| `dance` | house and its variants, trance, techno, electro, rave |
| `pop-punk` | pop punk, punk, emo, emocore, easycore, power pop |
| `screamo` | screamo, post-hardcore, metalcore, melodic hardcore, trancecore |
| `heavy-metal` | heavy metal, thrash, speed, power, death, prog, NWOBHM |
| `hair-metal` | hair metal, glam metal, glam rock, arena rock, AOR — 1975-1994 |
| `nu-metal` | nu metal, alternative metal, rapcore, industrial |
| `classic-rock` | classic rock, prog, psychedelic, blues rock, 70s, 60s |
| `80s-synths` | 80s, new wave, synth pop, electropop, post-punk — 1975-1992, rock excluded |
| `indie` | indie, indie rock, indie pop, britpop, singer-songwriter |
Measuring first mattered. `synthwave`, `edm`, `big room` and `hardstyle` are
plausible tags that carry **nothing at all** here, while `techstep`, `easycore`
and `hospital records` carry real weight. Guessing produces the first list.
Three kinds of tag are never used, and there is a test enforcing it:
- **Nationality** — `american` alone spans 241 artists. A passport is not a
sound.
- **`rock` and `electronic`** — 340 and 275 artists, most of the library. A
mood that matches everything is not a mood.
- **Artist names** — Last.fm's most popular tag for an artist is frequently
their own name. `green day`, `paramore` and `queen` are single-artist
playlists waiting to happen.
### Exclusions
A mood may also list `exclude`. An excluded tag drops the artist outright rather
than docking their score, and it exists because `80s-synths` cannot be written
any other way.
`80s` is the eleventh most-played tag here, and it sits on Def Leppard and Bon
Jovi exactly as heavily as on Eurythmics. Weighting cannot separate them,
because the tag it would weight is the one they share. What does separate them
is that the stadium rock also carries `hard rock` and `hair metal`, and the
synth acts do not.
Checked against live Last.fm pages, since the tag census only sees artists
already in the library:
| Artist | Tags |
| --- | --- |
| Eurythmics | `80s`, `new wave`, `pop`, `female vocalists`, `synth pop` |
| Frankie Goes to Hollywood | `80s`, `new wave`, `pop`, `british`, `dance` |
| Depeche Mode | `electronic`, `synthpop`, `new wave`, `80s`, `synth pop` |
| Duran Duran | `new wave`, `80s`, `pop`, `synth pop`, `rock` |
Four of Eurythmics' five tags are ones no mood may use. Three of the four
artists spell it **`synth pop`** with a space; only one spells it `synthpop`.
Guessing one spelling would have missed most of the canon.
An artist qualifies when their tag weights inside a mood sum to at least 30 out
of Last.fm's 0-100 scale. One low-weight tag is not a genre, it is somebody's
stray opinion.
`years` filters on the album's release date, which is what separates eighties
synth records from everything else a synthpop tag drags in.
`--vibes` replaces the whole set with a JSON file of the same shape, so a new
mood does not need a new release:
```json
[{ "name": "shoegaze", "tags": ["shoegaze", "dream pop"], "min_score": 40 }]
```
Names are validated when the file is read, not when the file is written. A bad
one would otherwise surface as a playlist created somewhere unintended.
### Paths
Lidarr knows where the lossless source is; the playlists have to point at the
MP3s music-mirror made from it. The mapping strips a library root from Lidarr's
track paths and re-roots them under the mirror, with the suffix changed.
`--library-root` is derived from the common parent of the indexed artist folders
when unset, so it agrees with Lidarr by construction rather than by being kept
in step by hand. Override it if that guess is wrong.
Entries are written **relative to the playlist file**, so one playlist works
from the NAS, from a Mac over SMB, and from Linux, without rewriting.
Each playlist is given the **owner and group of the mirror** it is written
into. The image runs as root by default so that a bind mount of any ownership
stays writable, and the cost of that is output owned by root — which the account
serving the share cannot read, group bit or no group bit, because the group is
also root. Copying the mirror's own ownership avoids having to be told what it
should be, and does nothing when the two already agree.
A track is only listed once its mirror file has been confirmed to exist. Lidarr
holding the FLAC says nothing about whether the MP3 has been encoded yet. If a
large number are missing, the run says so — that is what a wrong `--library-root`
or `--mirror` looks like, since the paths then map to nothing at all.
`_playlists/` survives music-mirror's prune: it only deletes `*.mp3`, and its
empty-directory sweep skips a directory holding M3Us.
## How the ingest works
Two halves, both taking their bounds from the database rather than from a saved
cursor, so an interrupted run resumes from what it actually has.
| Half | Window | Purpose |
| --------- | ---------------------- | ---------------------------------------- |
| Catch-up | `newest held` → `now` | New scrobbles since the last pass |
| Backfill | start → `oldest held` | Walks towards the beginning of the history |
The backfill asks repeatedly for the newest page of everything at or before a
cursor, and moves the cursor to the oldest scrobble that came back. When a whole
page shares a single second the cursor cannot move without stepping over the
rest of that second, so it takes the next page of the same window instead.
Both windows are bounded at both ends, so paging cannot shift under the fetch
while new scrobbles arrive mid-run.
Three details of the API that are easy to get wrong, all handled:
- The **currently-playing** track is prepended to the first page with no
timestamp at all. Stored once, it would come back on every pass forever.
- A **lone result** is returned as a bare object, not a one-item list.
- **MBIDs are empty strings** rather than absent when unknown, and an empty
string looks like a usable join key right up until it silently matches
everything.
Scrobbles have no identifier, so the primary key is timestamp plus artist plus
track. Two plays of the same track in the same second collapse into one; they
are genuinely indistinguishable, and a surrogate key would make re-ingest
non-idempotent, which is a far worse trade.
Retries cover error 29 (rate limit) and the backend failures, 8, 11 and 16,
with an exponential backoff. An invalid or suspended key fails immediately
rather than retrying four more times to reach the same conclusion.
## Usage
```sh
music-curator # one pass, then report
music-curator --interval 6h # keep running
music-curator --report-only # report on the store, fetch nothing
```
| Option | Environment variable | Default | Meaning |
| ------------------ | ----------------------------- | ------------------ | ------------------------------------------- |
| `--user` | `MUSIC_CURATOR_LASTFM_USER` | — | Last.fm username to read |
| `--api-key` | `MUSIC_CURATOR_LASTFM_API_KEY` | — | Last.fm API key |
| `--db` | `MUSIC_CURATOR_DB` | `/data/curator.db` | Path to the SQLite store |
| `--interval` | `MUSIC_CURATOR_INTERVAL` | unset | Repeat forever, e.g. `45m`, `6h`, `1d` |
| `--request-delay` | `MUSIC_CURATOR_REQUEST_DELAY` | `0.25` | Seconds between API requests |
| `--backfill-limit` | `MUSIC_CURATOR_BACKFILL_LIMIT` | `0` | Cap backfill requests per pass; 0 for no cap |
| `--lidarr-url` | `MUSIC_CURATOR_LIDARR_URL` | unset | Lidarr base URL, e.g. `http://lidarr:8686` |
| `--lidarr-api-key` | `MUSIC_CURATOR_LIDARR_API_KEY` | unset | Lidarr API key |
| `--mirror` | `MUSIC_CURATOR_MIRROR` | unset | Root of the MP3 mirror; playlists go here |
| `--library-root` | `MUSIC_CURATOR_LIBRARY_ROOT` | derived | Prefix to strip from Lidarr's paths |
| `--playlist-limit` | `MUSIC_CURATOR_PLAYLIST_LIMIT` | `100` | Most tracks in any one playlist |
| `--vibes` | `MUSIC_CURATOR_VIBES` | built-in | JSON file of mood definitions |
| `--tag-limit` | `MUSIC_CURATOR_TAG_LIMIT` | `0` | Cap artist tag lookups per pass |
| `--skip-index` | — | off | Match against the index already held |
| `--report-only` | — | off | Report without fetching |
A [Last.fm API key](https://www.last.fm/api/account/create) is all that is
needed. None of the endpoints used here authenticate a user, so there is no
shared secret, no session key and no signing.
The first pass over a long history is thousands of requests at 200 scrobbles
each. `--backfill-limit` spreads that over several passes if you would rather
not do it in one.
## Running it on TrueNAS Scale
`compose.yaml` is a Custom App definition. Adjust the host path and the `user:`
to match your pool, set the API key through the TrueNAS UI rather than in the
file, then add it as a custom app. The image is published to this Gitea's
registry on every release:
```
code.emmathe.dev/lyrathorpe/music-curator:latest
```
Give the store its own dataset. It is derived data and can be rebuilt from
Last.fm, but rebuilding means downloading the whole history again.
## Tests
```sh
docker build --target test . # what CI runs
pytest # needs pytest on PATH
```
The suite runs against fake transports for both services. The Last.fm one
reproduces its paging, its `from`/`to` semantics and its awkward response
shapes; the Lidarr one serves a canned library split across the same four
endpoints the indexer calls, so the stitching is exercised rather than
stubbed. No network, no credentials, no rate limit. On a Nix machine:
```sh
nix shell nixpkgs#python3Packages.pytest -c pytest
```
## Tools
Host-side scripts under `tools/`. Not part of the container image; run them
wherever they are needed.
### `find_missing_tracks.py`
Reports tracks in an Apple Music library whose files are no longer on disk —
which happens whenever Lidarr renames an artist or album folder and
music-mirror prunes the old path.
```sh
# Music: File > Library > Export Library... then, with the share mounted:
python3 tools/find_missing_tracks.py Library.xml --root /Volumes/music-mp3
```
Reading the exported XML rather than asking Music itself is deliberate. A
broken track makes AppleScript's `location` raise instead of returning a value,
so a bulk query dies on the first one with `-1728` and a per-track loop costs an
Apple event apiece.
It checks against a **single directory walk**, not a test per file. On a
50,000-track library that is ~7,000 directory reads instead of 50,000 stat
calls, and over SMB every one of those stats is a network round trip.
Two comparisons that have to be loosened, or most of the library reads as
missing:
- **Unicode.** macOS stores filenames decomposed; the share composes them.
`Mötley Crüe` is two different byte strings depending on which side wrote it.
Both sides are normalised to NFC.
- **Case.** The share is very likely case-insensitive. A file is not missing
because someone capitalised it differently.
Pass `--root` if the library holds anything outside the mirror: the root it
otherwise derives is the common parent of every track, which can be `/`.
## Where this is going
| Stage | Status |
| ------------------------------------------------ | ------------ |
| Last.fm ingest and store | done |
| Lidarr index and the scrobble-to-track matcher | done |
| M3U playlists from the listening history | done |
| Genre and mood playlists from Last.fm tags | done |
| Cold-music report, unmonitoring what is not played | last |
The cull will unmonitor cold albums in Lidarr and tag their artists. It will
never delete files: Lidarr's `AlbumResource` has no tags at all, so tagging
only works per artist, and an artist is only tagged when every one of their
albums qualifies. It will also refuse to run at all if the matcher's coverage
is poor, because an unmatched track is not an unplayed track.
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