Obsidian Bases upgrades my music library

Aug 19, 2025

Obsidian Bases is out! Bases lets you view your Markdown notes as Notion-esque databases. I'm a paying Obsidian license holder, so I could have been playing with the pre-release feature for the last couple months, but I wanted to wait until it's fully baked. (Plus I don't think I'm supposed to run the pre-release stuff on my work computer.)

I've been eager to try it with my growing Markdown music library, which was one area where Bear.app had a leg up on Obsidian in my comparison. The results did not disappoint, and now Obsidian is the big winner in this little side quest. 🙌

My music catalog now looks like this:

And here's how it works:

• Each album is a Markdown note with the #music/album tag.
  • I've been creating these notes for some months now. I have a Python script that pulls from the Spotify API to generate the entire note for me. I just feed it the Spotify URL for the album.
• I created a base and applied #music/album as a filter. This worked immediately, but without the album covers. I wanted to see all the pretty pictures!
• I created a Card layout (as opposed to the default Table layout). This lets you show an image for each note. See these docs.
• I set the Image property config to the image-url note property. This is a custom property that I planned to use.
• I wrote a script to add that image-url property to all my album notes.
  • My original script adds the image URLs to the body of the note, so I already had all the image references, but they weren't in the frontmatter as a property that Bases can read. So my fix-up script needed to find those image URLs in each note and add them to the frontmatter as well.
• Et voilà! Pretty pictures!

You can have lots of different configured views within a single base. So I added more for my list of focus music (#music/focus tag), dinner music (#music/dinner), another for music my wife likes or that I want to play for her, etc.

You can also add more properties underneath the picture. I've since added my rating property (a 1–5 scale) and am now sorting the cards by my rating as well.

I'm impressed with Bases so far. Can't wait to play with it some more. Recipes, you're next!