Listening Post
Always-on music recognition for macOS. Scrobble anywhere, local and remote. Automate using Shortcuts. Your data stays yours. And of course no audio leaves your Mac.
For macOS 15.6+. Currently in public beta.
Free during beta. After that: Perpetual upgrade licenses. No subscriptions.
After downloading, check
the documentation for details, and
our forum for discussion and support.
Just like the Force:
Music Is All Around Us.
Listening Post keeps an open ear to the music around you.
It hears what you hear via your Mac's mic. What was that song that was on three minutes or an hour ago? LP can tell you, and provides links those tracks on Apple Music, Spotify, Deezer, and other services. If you like, it also scrobbles the track info to ListenBrainz, Last.fm, and/or any other supported scrobbler. Additionally, it can save the info to local files, or run an automation. Mix and match!
Does any audio leave my Mac?
Emphatically: Absolutely ZERO audio is sent anywhere. Recognition uses Apple's own Shazam service, and that doesn't involve shuffling audio files around! Only track metadata (artist, title, etc.) is shared with the services you explicitly enable.
How is this different from {other Spotify / Apple Music scrobbler app}?
Most tools that let you scrobble Apple Music or Spotify tracks only work with Apple Music or Spotify,
directly hooking into those apps to figure out which song is playing.
Listening Post is not doing that, instead it uses your microphone to work with any
music source: videos, streaming radio, Youtube, vinyl playing on your cool '90s grammophone, coffee shop background jazz,
etc. — and yes, also Apple Music and Spotify!
Here's How It Works.
Recognition
Every minute, Listening Post briefly uses the mic to check for playing music. When it detects a song, the track is saved to its internal database, and shown under its menubar icon (next to the clock).
Enrichment
After recognition, the app queries external services like ListenBrainz, Spotify, or Last.fm for their track links. Each source is only queried when its corresponding channel is enabled.
It Posts Your Listens (Eh? EH? 😅)
Recognized tracks wait in a queue (default: 5 mins) before being sent anywhere (see below). This gives you time to skip false positives or tell the app to forget particularly awful songs.
Don't Just Listen, Do Stuff!
Channels let you work with your recognized tracks. Each can be independently enabled or disabled. All are optional.
Scrobble to local CSV or JSONL files, Last.fm, ListenBrainz (and compatibles), Maloja, Rocksky (and compatibles), or macOS Shortcuts.
Kinda like "Live, Laugh, Love" but for music: The app finds your recognized tracks on Apple Music, Spotify, and Deezer. It supports liking tracks on Last.fm, ListenBrainz, and Spotify.
Post recognized tracks to Mastodon / ActivityPub or Bluesky, either automatic or manually.
What's playing? Just check your desktop!
Run macOS Shortcuts workflows on recognitions and more.
It's early days, and the future is unknowable! Still, there's a Listening Post roadmap.
#DigitalSovereignty
Why Does This App Exist?
I wanted something like Listening Post for a long time for myself: a good macOS-native scrobbler
that is not tied to a) any specific music service (Apple Music, Spotify, etc.) or b) any specific scrobbling
service (Last.fm etc.).
Don't get me wrong: Last.fm is nice, but it shouldn't be my source of truth! Lock-in is real. Services jack up
prices, decide you're not their target demo anymore, or shut down their APIs so you lose access to the raw data.
And then what?
Listening Post stores your data on your machine, where it belongs, and exports to local files,
in formats you can work with. You share to scrobbling services rather than fully rely on them.
Because, and this is the important part:
We shouldn't have to ask external services for our own damn data. With LP, our listening
history is ours from the start, and we decide what we want to do with it.
#DigitalSovereignty
Sounds Good? Allow Me To Keep In Touch.
Stay up to date with Listening Post's progress, my apps and services, and the occasional sale.
A place to discuss your Shortcuts workflows. You can also ask questions, share your ideas and report bugs.
Lots of friendly people there.
Visit the ActionsDotWork Forum
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If you want to chat, find me on Mastodon
@actionsdotwork@pkm.social (just apps & services) and
@czottmann@norden.social (personal account).
I'm also on Bluesky:
@actions.work (just apps & services) and
@zottmann.dev (personal account).
And since I need a place to post tutorials and whatnot, there's
@ActionsDotWork on YouTube.