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.

Bulk import

Open Import a list, paste, hit Queue all. These all parse:

Radiohead - Karma Police
Juice WRLD – Lucid Dreams          (en dash)
3. Gorillaz - Feel Good Inc        (numbered list)
Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden
Come As You Are                    (bare title — Deezer copes)
https://deezer.com/album/12345     (expanded into its tracks)
https://deezer.com/playlist/6789   (same)

In bulk mode there's no picker — the top-ranked Deezer hit is taken automatically. Every job shows what it resolved to, so a bad auto-pick is visible in the list rather than quietly landing the wrong song. Lines that match nothing are reported back as skipped instead of failing the batch.

Failed jobs get a Retry button. Most Soulseek failures are the peer going offline, not a bad request, so retrying later usually just works.

Everything goes through a bounded queue

MUSE_WORKERS (default 3) caps concurrent Soulseek searches. This matters: each search is 10-40s of polling plus real load on slskd, so one task per request — which an earlier version did — means a 50-track paste launches 50 concurrent searches and drowns the client. Requests return instantly and the queue drains at a civil rate.

The queue is in memory, so anything still queued or searching is put back on it at startup. A restart mid-import resumes instead of stranding jobs.

How results are ranked

Two separate rankings, and they fail in different ways.

Picking the track (Deezer). Title relevance dominates — whatever query words the artist name doesn't explain must appear in the title. That term exists because without it a completely different song by the right artist competes on equal footing: Oasis - Live Forever once resolved to Cloudburst, because a small variant penalty was enough to tip between two unrelated tracks. Artist match, popularity, and a penalty for derivative versions (cover, karaoke, live, demo, remix…) come after.

Derivative terms match on word boundaries, not substrings — a bare live is needed to catch Come As You Are (Live), but substring matching would also penalise Deliver Me and Olive. And a term only counts against a result when you didn't type it, so oasis live forever and nirvana unplugged still work.

Picking the file (Soulseek). Format preference first, 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 available now.

Running it

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:

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_WORKERS	3	concurrent Soulseek searches
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:

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
POST /api/import	queue many from pasted text
POST /api/retry/{id}	requeue a failed job
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.