Soundcloud Browser

From v3.7

Overview

This browser lets you interact with Soundcloud and play tracks from the millions on offer. Where possible it aims to keep the look and feel as familiar and integrated to the Quod Libet experience as possible.

../../_images/soundcloud-browser-2017-08.png

Connecting your account

If you have a Soundcloud account, you can also:

  • access your favorites

  • rate (like / unlike) songs.

  • list your own tracks (QL 3.10+)

To do so, click the Soundcloud connect button at the bottom right.

This will then take you to. If your operating system is configured to process quodlibet:// URLs with Quod Libet (see the instructions given to you there) then this process will happen automatically. If not, you can enter the code manually using the same button.

If not, you can copy the code from the web page that appears and click the QL button again to enter it.

Once you are logged, in you can log out by clicking the same button again, now a disconnect button (seen in the screenshot).

Features

Higher quality streams

The Soundcloud browser will use the download URL, where available, for the highest quality stream. Note this may require that you are logged in, and is usually not available.

Support for Quod Libet queries

One of the more interesting features of the soundcloud browser is that it can translate simpler queries in standard QL syntax to something that can work across the web to a library that isn’t yours.

Obviously, there are many limitations to this approach both conceptually and due to its implementation, but nonetheless queries like &(#(length>300), title=dubstep) get (roughly) what you might expect.

Favorites

These are supported as ~rating (see below), and unrating a track will unfavorite it in Soundcloud, if you are logged in.

Tags

Supported tags

  • artist, genre, and title translate as you might imagine

  • website translates to Soundcloud’s current URL for that track

  • genre holds the genres (plural) tagged in Soundcloud (these are rarely useful but YMMV)

  • date is the creation date in Soundcloud

  • ~#rating is translated to 0.0 (not a Soundcloud favourite) or 1.0 (a Soundcloud favourite)

  • ~#bitrate is the highest bitrate available when playing the track (normally 128)

  • ~comments translates to the track details in Soundcloud.

  • bpm is the Soundcloud BPM if provided.

New tags

  • ~#favoritings_count and ~#likes_count etc represent how often these tracks have been favorited / liked (note that there currently seem to be inconsistencies within Soundcloud itself as to how these are populated)

  • soundcloud_track_id is the Soundcloud ID for the track.

  • soundcloud_user_id is the Soundcloud ID for the user.

  • artwork_url is the (remote) image URL for the track artwork on Soundcloud. This works well with the corresponding Artwork URL Cover Source plugin.

Comments

Comments in Soundcloud have been integrated to QL as read-only bookmarks, as they are also time-specific text to do with a particular song. Unlike bookmarks they have a lot more metadata (notably the user), so this is rendered as text.

To see them, access as you normally would bookmarks (e.g. view info, right-click the time widget or edit the bookmarks).