Neuvo music catalog
TLDR: Using Bear.app and the Spotify API to get a bit closer to a music collection of yore.
“Can we please listen to an album?” I ask my wife not infrequently, with a smile and a wink to mask the desperation. I’m weary of the Spotify playlist algorithm endlessly feeding me stuff it thinks I’ll like, which often means the same songs regurgitated ad nauseam. Actually, correction: it feeds me stuff it thinks my wife likes, since she often beats me to the punch and starts the music from her Spotify account. And it regurtitates those songs ad nauseam. And that’s fine. It’s totally fine. It doesn’t bother me at all.
I miss CD collections. I miss thumbing through those plastic cases, staring into the cover art, reading the track lists. I miss the physical act of choosing a CD, putting it in the player, and committing to it — even if the commitment is for no other reason than swapping CDs is a clunky affair. That commitment means you’re taking a journey that many people put a great deal of effort into creating.
Meanwhile, I’ve been keeping music notes (now in Bear) for some years now. I do this for a number of reasons, but primary among them is so that, when I feel the need to listen to an album, I have a list of great ones to choose from. I try to categorize them by listening context: me alone, me with my wife, dinnertime, hanging with friends, etc.
I feel this has been a reasonable endeavor, but also an unsatisfying one. In this format, all albums look the same: a text title, a category tag, and perhaps a hasty note or excerpt from Pitchfork or Rolling Stone or Reddit. Perusing this digital collection feels more like an intellectual effort than an emotional or artistic one. I read the album title and any notes I’ve jotted, and I try to conjure a corresponding feeling. But that feeling never gets viscerally associated with the album cover like it used to. Nor do I seem to be able to remember which tracks are on which albums, or what the tracks are even called, nearly as often as I used to.
Room for improvement
As I mentioned above, I moved to Bear for notes a little over a month ago. A cool feature of Bear is that, if a note contains images, Bear will show them in the notes preview in the left sidebar. It occurred to me that if each album in my music notes included an image of the cover art, then scrolling through that preview sidebar and clicking on an album note might feel a few steps closer to thumbing through a collection of CDs and picking one out for inspection.
I knew I’d have to automate the data entry for this to be plausible.
Fortunately, Spotify has an API with an album endpoint.
So I turned to my dear friend Alfred and created a Workflow that takes a Spotify album URL as input, fetches the album JSON from the API, sets the Bear note title to {artist name} - {album name} , downloads the image and pastes it into my note, and finally generates the note body and pastes that as well.
To create or update a music note for an album, I open the album in Spotify, click Share -> Copy Album Link, hop into my Bear note, paste that into my Alfred Workflow, and voilà!
Here’s what it looks like so far:
I'm pleased! It’s been a fun little project, and the output is roughly what I was hoping for. Time will tell if it ends up feeling meaningfully different than the old way.