muse: request a single song, get it tagged in your library

Lidarr's smallest unit is a MusicBrainz release, so asking for one track
means monitoring a whole discography. Soulseek trades individual files but
has no concept of a request. muse bridges the two: search, click, and the
song lands in the library correctly tagged.

The design point is that the user picks the exact track before anything
downloads, so muse holds artist, album, year and track number as ground
truth and tags deterministically rather than inferring them afterwards from
whatever a stranger named the file.

Search is Deezer rather than MusicBrainz, decided on measurement:
MusicBrainz put eight covers above the real recording for "radiohead creep"
and never surfaced Queen for "bohemian rhapsody" across 90 results, because
its index matches a word in a cover's title as readily as in the artist
field. Re-ranking cannot rescue a result set missing the right row.

Imports are os.link(), so downloads keep seeding from the Soulseek share
while the library gets a second name for the same bytes.
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# muse
Request a single song, get it in your music library, correctly tagged.
```
you type "radiohead creep"
↓ Deezer track search
you click Get
↓ exact album, year and track number looked up
↓ slskd searches Soulseek, candidates scored
↓ best one downloaded
↓ tags written, hardlinked into the library
/music/Radiohead/Pablo Honey (1993)/02 - Creep.flac
```
## Why this exists
Lidarr thinks in MusicBrainz *releases*, so the smallest thing it can want is
an album — ask for one song and you end up monitoring a discography. Soulseek
trades individual files but has no concept of a request. Nothing bridged the
two, so getting one track meant either pulling whole albums through Lidarr or
hand-filing downloads out of slskd's UI.
muse is the missing piece: search → click → it appears in your library.
## The design point
**You pick the exact track before anything downloads.** That means muse holds
the artist, album, year and track number as ground truth *before the file
exists*, and tags deterministically.
Taggers like beets have to infer all of that afterwards from whatever a
stranger happened to name the file. muse never guesses.
## Why Deezer for search, not MusicBrainz
MusicBrainz was tried first and measured worse:
| query | MusicBrainz | Deezer |
|---|---|---|
| `radiohead creep` | 8 covers/mashups above the real recording | `Creep / Radiohead / Pablo Honey` first |
| `bohemian rhapsody` | Queen absent from 90 results | covers, but Queen appears once artist is named |
MusicBrainz is an excellent database and a poor search engine — its index
matches a word in a cover's *title* as readily as one in the artist field.
Client-side re-ranking can only reorder what came back, so it cannot rescue a
result set that lacks the right row.
Deezer's API needs no key and no OAuth. Its search payload omits track number
and release date, so those come from `/track/{id}` at request time — one extra
call per request, not per search result.
## Running it
```yaml
services:
muse:
image: ghcr.io/geneticglitch1/muse:latest
container_name: muse
user: 1000:1000
environment:
- SLSKD_URL=http://slskd-host:5030
- SLSKD_API_KEY=<your slskd api key>
- MUSE_DOWNLOAD_DIR=/data/torrents/soulseek/complete
- MUSE_LIBRARY_DIR=/data/media/music
- MUSE_DB=/config/muse.db
volumes:
- ./config:/config
# ONE mount covering both the download dir and the library. See below.
- /data:/data
ports:
- 5040:5040
```
### Mount both paths under a single volume
Imports are `os.link()`, never a move, so the download keeps being shared by
slskd while the library gets a second name for the same bytes.
`link()` between two different **mounts** fails with `EXDEV` even when both sit
on the same filesystem. Split `/data` into a downloads mount and a library
mount and every import silently degrades to a full copy, storing everything
twice. Verify after your first import:
```bash
stat -c "%h" "/data/media/music/<Artist>/<Album> (<Year>)/<NN> - <Title>.flac"
```
`2` is correct. `1` means it copied.
### Configuration
| variable | default | meaning |
|---|---|---|
| `SLSKD_URL` | `http://192.168.1.87:5030` | slskd base URL |
| `SLSKD_API_KEY` | — | slskd API key (**required**) |
| `MUSE_DOWNLOAD_DIR` | `/data/torrents/soulseek/complete` | where slskd puts finished files |
| `MUSE_LIBRARY_DIR` | `/data/media/music` | where the library lives |
| `MUSE_DB` | `/config/muse.db` | job history |
| `MUSE_FORMATS` | `flac,mp3` | ordered preference; anything else is rejected |
| `MUSE_MIN_MATCH` | `0.45` | filename-to-title similarity floor |
| `MUSE_LOG_LEVEL` | `INFO` | |
`MUSE_FORMATS` is a preference list, best first — rejecting everything not on
it is what keeps `.cue` and `.m4a` junk out.
`MUSE_MIN_MATCH` guards against importing the wrong song. Soulseek filenames
are chaotic (`08-radiohead-creep_(accoustic)-ent.mp3`), so the comparison is
against a normalised form and also accepts plain containment. Raise it if you
get bad matches; lowering it is how you quietly corrupt a library.
### How candidates are scored
In priority order: format preference, then whether the peer can actually serve
you (free upload slot, short queue), then filename plausibility, then bitrate.
A marginally better file behind 200 queued users loses to a good-enough one you
can have now.
## Pulling on a server
The GHCR package inherits this repo's visibility, so it is **private**. The
machine pulling it needs to authenticate once:
1. Create a classic PAT at <https://github.com/settings/tokens> with only
**`read:packages`**.
2. On the server:
```bash
echo "<token>" | docker login ghcr.io -u <github-username> --password-stdin
```
That writes `~/.docker/config.json` and persists across reboots. Classic PATs
can be set to no expiry; if you set one, the pull starts failing on that date
with `denied`.
To make the image public instead — no login needed anywhere — go to the
package page → Package settings → Change visibility.
## API
| endpoint | purpose |
|---|---|
| `GET /` | web UI |
| `GET /api/search?q=` | Deezer track search |
| `POST /api/request` | queue a track |
| `GET /api/jobs` | request history and state |
| `GET /api/health` | slskd reachability, mount writability |
## Releases
Every push to `main` publishes `:latest` and `:sha-<short>`. Tagging `vX.Y.Z`
also publishes `X.Y.Z` and `X.Y`. Pin a tag in production if you'd rather not
track `latest`.