iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Adding some stuff to deal with the site getting overloaded by bot traffic. If you hit issues, try reloading first, patience second.

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

API-based functions on everynoise.com are now operational again.

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Still waiting for Spotify to process everynoise.com's API quota-extension re-request. New Release Friday apologies to NRbG users.

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

All everynoise.com functions that use the live Spotify API are currently broken due to Spotify disabling everynoise's API access without warning. I have filed a request to get it turned back on, but am not expecting to hear back one way or the other for a few days.

everynoise.com

Every Noise at Once

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

All everynoise.com functions that use the live Spotify API are currently broken due to a change on Spotify's end. I will assume accidental error, and have contacted support.

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

If you're near Mumbai and want to hear me talk about music and algorithms and humanity, I'll be speaking at the All About Music conference on August 26th! www.allaboutmusic.in/glenn-mcdona...

allaboutmusic.in

Glenn McDonald - ALL ABOUT MUSIC

Glenn McDonald Algorithm Designer Glenn McDonald is a music evangelist, algorithm designer, software engineer and technology strategist. He created the...

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

If you want a new-release-finding power-tool, or a complete semi-cryptic music interface, everynoise.com/nrbg.html and everynoise.com/curio.html both now work without any extra pre-configuration.

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

everynoise.com/canonicalpat... now has a few modes: "live" gets current top songs for 50 artists, "spotify" uses Spotify's idea of the 20 nearest artists, "original" is the full long list as of the end of 2023. The two * versions pick songs more randomly.

everynoise.com

The Canonical Path

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

If you have bookmarked anything on everynoise.com ending in .cgi and it just stopped working, update your bookmark to .html and it should work again and you should tell me if it doesn't.

everynoise.com

Every Noise at Once

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Reposted by Every Noise at Once

glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Me, on stage, modeling an everynoise hoodie! Natalia Anderson, interviewing me in English English! Earnest, if varyingly satisfying, answers to reasonable questions! The video of my appearance at the recent m4music conference in Zurich is now online. www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA7e...

youtube.com

Streaming, Spotify, Discovery: The Mind Behind the Algorithm | Conference @ m4music Festival 2026

YouTube video by m4music Festival

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

Spotify has 59 artists named Fiona. The catalogs of the top 6 map via ISRCs to 6, 3, 5, 0, 1 and 3 different Apple Music artists. AM has 22 Fionas. One of them maps via ISRCs to 30 different Spotify artists, another to 9, and 6 more to multiple. USUM72010080 open.spotify.com/track/1iCvpI...

open.spotify.com

Life On The Moon

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Reposted by Every Noise at Once

glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

Hmm, what about a query that traverses music services?

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

If you were using NRbG with a free Spotify account, you probably just got cut off. See the bottom of the NRbG page for a link to join the group for more info.

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

Data navigation. (dactal.org/curiam.html – you'll need Apple Music for this one, and tolerance for a deliberately unadorned state.)

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 07/03/2026

If you use NRbG with a Development Mode API key, things are supposedly about to get bad for that. If you're interested in alternatives, see the bottom of the page for a group you could join to discuss such things.

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Reposted by Every Noise at Once

glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

If you're in Zurich on March 20th, you could come see me talk about algorithms and music discovery and human creativity and machines and power. How many of the Swiss metal bands I personally like will I find excuses to mention? www.m4music.ch/events/en/20...

m4music.ch

Streaming, Spotify, Song Discovery: The Mind Behind the Algorithm

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Presumably NRbG and Curio are now broken for newly created Spotify API keys. Due to the same petty new restrictions to the API I can't create a new API key myself, and thus can't even try them that way. But other people report hitting 429s and getting locked out almost immediately.

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Reposted by Every Noise at Once

glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

If you've read my book, thanks, that was awesome of you! If you haven't, but not as a matter of principle, you could read the beginning and see if that makes you feel like reading more. www.book2look.com/book/RVopHiZ...

book2look.com

You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song : Glenn McDonald

A former Spotify insider reveals how streaming has changed the global musical landscape and what it means for fans, musicians and the music industry.

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

If you have hit issues with the Listening History views in Curio showing zero counts for things, do this:

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

If your information software doesn't make you want a bigger monitor, what good is it?

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

Planning ahead for the end of the year, which is STILL A MONTH AWAY: a thing for comparing a genre capsule for your year in music to a friend's. (And yes, in my test case, my "friend" is myself from another year.)

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Reposted by Every Noise at Once

glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

I talked to PJ Wehry on the Chasing Leviathan podcast, and now you can hear us: www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCTd...

youtube.com

Every Noise at Once: Spotify, Music Discovery, and Human Connection with Glenn McDonald #podcast

YouTube video by The Chasing Leviathan Podcast

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

The genre system we created at the Echo Nest and expanded for a subsequent decade at Spotify had, by its unnecessary demise, over 6500 genres, every one of them picked and guided by humans. The automated ML system that replaced it has 708 tags.

everynoise.com

Every Noise at Once

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

Sometimes I come across a very long playlist and I want a quick sense of how my own listening intersects with it. There are lots of ways to quantify this, but here's one of them in Curio query form (you can copy and paste the query from the alt-text):

?28pRQNZyF8cHagMgrpLBOR.other playlists.tracks
/my artist=(.artists:@1.id.artists)
||apoints=(.my artist.counts.points...._,(1),total),alignment=[=apoints*count]#alignment

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

If you're curious about how different streaming-royalty allocation schemes would affect you and your artists, or could be tempted into curiosity if you thought there was a way to see this, there's a way to see this: furia.com/log/517

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

People complain about Spotify's shuffle mode, and I never listen on shuffle so I don't care, but if you do, you can make your own in Curio: tracks....shuffle/artist;.1:@<=100 Run that on the query page, and then save the results as a playlist.

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

Do not let the world's deluge of grievous wrongs numb you to your own tiny useless delightful errors.

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

If you want to scrutinize algorithmic playlists Spotify makes for you, you can copy their tracks into normal playlists and then use Curio to run queries on those. E.g.: playlists:~<[DW 2025-06-27].other playlists .tracks.(.artists:@1).other artists /label=(.artist catalogs.catalog.label)#count

Screenshot of my playlist list showing:
DW 2025-06-27 Synthwave 30
DW 2025-06-27 Alt 30
DW 2025-06-27 Pop 30
DW 2025-06-27 J-Pop 30
DW 2025-06-27 Metal 30

Screenshot of my Curio query page, showing this query:

playlists:~<[DW 2025-06-27].other playlists.tracks.(.artists:@1).other artists
/label=(.artist catalogs.catalog.label)#count

returning results like

283 label count↓ of
1 Independent 3 of [...3]
2 Art Gates Records 2 of [...2]
3 Artistfy Music 2 of [...2]
4 FRIENDSHIP. 2 of [...2]
5 QOOLONG 2 of [...2]
6 recordJet 2 of [...2]
7 1964251 Records DK2 1 of [Anteeter]
8 2019 We are Suburban 1 of [Rebecca Lou]
9 2023 maddy irene ©️ 1 of [maddy irene]
10 2023 Wormholedeath Records 1 of [Conspiracy of Blackness]
11 2074559 Records DK2 1 of [Re:O]
12 2080792 Records DK 1 of [DIGITAL LOVE]
13 210485 Manhatten Discs 1 of [DIGITAL LOVE]
14 2285049 Records DK 1 of [Crimson Crisis]
15 3105988 Records DK 1 of [Caldera]
16 3151900 Records DK2 1 of [The Hunt]
17 3304016 Records DK 1 of [DJ MIX-ICON]
18 3677236 Records DK2 1 of [Queen of Dreams]
19 3947540 Records DK2 1 of [DIGITAL LOVE]
20 5880853 Records DK2 1 of [Diamond Riot]
21 655386 Records DK 1 of [Gone Are the Days]

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

Here, for example, is ?? in a Curio query that gets a playlist and some albums, annotates the track, album and artist overlaps between them (in that order of priority), and flags the tracks in each album that were previously released (by that artist) before their album appearances.

|artistkey=>(.artists:@1.id),
songkey=>(....artistkey,name,concatenate),
albumkey=>(....artistkey,(.album.name),concatenate)

?(6tHWkiFaXkuGFGrA5BGjkw.other playlists/),
(4NDg5ffB2LRsI64Ojj979x,2KcDTzr3qk1nL5KClxHAUt.other albums
??old songs=(
.(??this .artists:@1.artist catalogs.catalog:release_date<(this.release date))
.tracks/id=(.songkey)
)
||<tracks,old=(.songkey.old songs)
/)
||<of,<tracks,artistkey=(.artistkey),songkey=(.songkey),albumkey=(.albumkey)

??songindex=(/id=(.of.tracks.songkey):count>1||match=~track)
??albumindex=(/id=(.of.tracks.albumkey):count>1||match=~album)
??artistindex=(/id=(.of.tracks.artistkey):count>1||match=~artist)
|<of,<tracks,
matchsong=(.songkey.songindex),
matchalbum=(.albumkey.albumindex),
matchartist=(.artistkey.artistindex),
match=(.matchsong;matchalbum;matchartist.match)

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

DACTAL changes that might affect you if you're doing Curio queries: filter negation was :! now :- reverse index-number filtering was :@- now :@@ repeat was ?? now !

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

Today's tiny DACTAL tweak that probably affects nobody: in an aggregation, semicolons explicitly identify aggregators. So this query is a count of counts; the first "count" is a property (of groups), the second "count" is the aggregator. tracks/artist...count;count

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

Made some improvements to playlist comparisons. (Also, did you know Curio does playlist comparisons?)

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Here's what you get when your software is built by people who don't live in it. This is Spotify's useful display of what you've recently played, by playlist. But if you tap a song here, it doesn't resume that playlist, it starts playing through THIS view, which is your play-history in reverse.

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

The Spotify iOS app has adopted the annoying habit of starting my playlists over again, so in defense recent Listmarks in Curio can now be expanded to show your recent play history within them, so you can jump back to where you really were.

Screenshot of Curio's Listmarks page, showing the new ☰ button for opening a recent playlist's recently-played-tracks list.

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

Happy NMF. Some notes about a geeky Curio feature. www.furia.com/log/507 NMFinder 2025-04-18 open.spotify.com/playlist/1j4... the new Flight of Icarus song is out (and some others) open.spotify.com/playlist/2hz...

furia.com

furialog

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

"Best practices" are incurious. Practice is most interesting when you don't predetermine what it is allowed to reveal. You can now annotate playlists in Curio. And do what else with those annotations? Nothing, yet.

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 14/04/2025

Hooked up the DACTAL export function. Particularly useful in Curio for copying Listmarks' recent_history to other browsers.

Small screenshot showing the "export this data" arrow next to each dataset on the Curio/DACTAL query page.

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 12/04/2025

I wanted some Curio track-flagging features that were too specific to justify adding as general features, but that in itself justified adding a custom-flagging feature.

The bottom of a Curio playlist page, with some custom track-flagging functions shown under the row of action buttons.

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

Curio is mostly intended for desktop use, but I've now made some very basic style tweaks for rudimentary phone-screen support. The only thing specifically tuned FOR phone use is the Listmarks page.

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

If you create a playlist from a query in Curio, like NMFinder for example, you can now rerun the query to update it from the playlist's Curio page.

Curio playlist page, showing the pointer hovering over the ↯ icon next to the playlist name, which has the tooltip "rerun source query and update playlist".

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

Album-cover scan-previewing in Curio is now on Option-hover instead of Command-hover, to eliminate jump-scares if you cycle into a tab or window with your pointer in the wrong place.

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Reposted by Every Noise at Once

glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

If the amount curious you are about my book is $4.99, the ebook version has dropped to your bargaining point. a.co/d/4lUJ1zp

a.co

Amazon.com

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

I added a "lookup" connector to Curio so that queries can navigate into any api.spotify.com links the Spotify API returns. E.g. playlists:@1.tracks.href.lookup.results.items:@1.added_by.href.lookup

Screenshot of the results of this query, showing user data for the user who added the first track to this playlist.

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

I spent almost 5 minutes searching the web for liner-notes on this compilation to explain which tracks came from where, and then I remembered that I have a tool for that.

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 09/03/2025

Can we collate our collective knowledge ourselves? Not as much as should be our right, but sometimes, a little bit. open.spotify.com/playlist/2BV...

Cover strips from the first 5 albums represented in this playlist.

The DACTAL query used to generate this playlist, which you can import into Curio for your own use using the link in the playlist description.

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

The first-letter song links in NRbG were originally a placeholder idea, but I became instantly fond of them, and I'm always pleased when they reveal some pattern that is less obvious in full context, like the way this album was maybe not entirely sequenced for artistic effect:

Image showing some new music releases, and the first letters of the tracks on each, revealing that one of them has its tracks mostly just in alphabetic order.

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

Finding songs by matching playlist-title words is a bad method, but bad methods should at least be easy. In Curio: power ballads.matching playlists.matches /track=tracks:count>=10 #rank=count,(.track.popularity) /artist=(.track.artists:@1).(.of:@1) #rank .track open.spotify.com/playlist/1sH...

open.spotify.com

power ballads

Playlist · glenn mcdonald · 238 items

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Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 07/02/2025

In today's big Curio news, I fixed a bug in a feature that I've never explained, and which might be too specific to my own habits to be useful even if I did. But I use it once a week, and I broke it between last week and this week, and now it's fixed again.

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