Listen Later — LMS Plugin

Features at a glance

Requirements

• Lyrion Music Server 9.0.0+ (tested with the Material Skin; classic skin covers add/browse/play).
• For streaming albums, the matching service plugin installed and signed in: Qobuz, Tidal, Bandcamp, Deezer and/or Spotify (via Spotty). Library albums need nothing extra.

Every streaming integration is optional and degrades gracefully — if a service plugin isn't present, albums from it simply can't be replayed.

Installation

Via repository (recommended). In LMS go to Settings → Plugins → Additional Repositories and add:

https://simonarnold002.github.io/LMS-Listen-to-Later/repo.xml

Then install Listen Later from the plugin list and restart.

Manual. Download ListenLater.zip from the repository, unzip it into your LMS Plugins/ directory so it sits as Plugins/ListenLater/, and restart:

sudo rm -rf /var/lib/squeezeboxserver/Plugins/ListenLater
sudo unzip ListenLater.zip -d /var/lib/squeezeboxserver/Plugins/
sudo chown -R squeezeboxserver:nogroup /var/lib/squeezeboxserver/Plugins/ListenLater
sudo systemctl restart lyrionmusicserver

Quick start

1. Browse to any album or track in your library or a streaming service, or to a podcast episode in Deezer or Spotify.
2. Open its "…" menu and choose Add to Listen Later (or Add to Wish List).
3. Open Apps → Listen Later to see your lists. Tap a row to play it.
4. Play most of it and it moves itself to Played.

Using it

Adding things

Add to Listen Later and Add to Wish List appear in the "…" context menu of albums and tracks — local library and streaming alike. Adding something that's already saved (in any list) does nothing, so an accidental tap can't disturb your lists or bounce a Played item back.

The menu wording is the same everywhere, because the row you're on already tells you what you're saving: an album row saves the album, a track row saves that track. The one exception is Material's Now Playing screen, where there's no surrounding list to make it obvious — there the menu says Add track to Listen Later, and Add album to Listen Later sits in "… → More" if you want the whole release instead.

Albums, tracks, playlists and podcasts

Each saved row is labelled with what it is on the line beneath the title, which carries a small glyph — ♫ for a multi-track release, ♪ for a single track, ≡ for a playlist, ❝ for a podcast episode — followed by the type and the source, e.g. ♫ Album · Qobuz. The title line stays a plain Artist – Album (Year):

• Album / EP / Single — a whole release. The wording is the one MusicBrainz or the streaming service gives it, so it's shown as they have it. It isn't always literal — a release called an EP can hold a single track — so the glyph goes by the real track listing once the release has been counted, and only falls back to the label until then.
• Track — one song, saved from a track row. It plays on tap rather than opening a tracklist.
• Playlist — a curated playlist from a streaming service, kept as a playlist rather than flattened into its tracks (see below).
• Podcast — one episode, marked with a quote glyph rather than a note (see below).

Saving a streaming single stores it as the Single release rather than a loose track, so adding "the single" and "the track" can't leave you with two rows for the same recording.

Playlists

A curated or service playlist — a Qobuz or Deezer editorial list, a TIDAL or Spotify playlist — can be saved whole, from its "…" menu like anything else. It's stored as a playlist rather than as its tracks, so it stays live: open it later and you get whatever the playlist holds now, replayed through the service it came from. Needs the matching plugin installed: Qobuz, TIDAL, Deezer or Spotify (via Spotty).

Playlists end up under the same two rules as podcast episodes, for the same reason — a playlist isn't a release you buy, and it isn't a fixed thing you can finish:

• **A playlist never lands in the Wish List.** A playlist row can still show Add to Wish List — Material builds a menu per surface, not per row — but pressing it saves to Listen Later, and the confirmation tells you which list it went to. Move to Wish List isn't offered on a saved playlist either, and is refused if something asks for it anyway. Podcast episodes follow exactly the same three rules.
• **It never moves itself to Played.** A curated playlist changes under you, so "most of it heard" has no meaning. You can still move it to Played by hand.

**One kind that can't be saved as a playlist: a Qobuz personal playlist with no cover of its own.** Qobuz gives those a constituent track's album art and no identifiable link, which makes them indistinguishable from an album row — so they're saved the way they always were rather than as a playlist. Editorial Qobuz playlists, which have their own artwork, are fine.

Podcasts

Podcast episodes from Deezer and Spotify can be saved to Listen Later. Add one from its "…" menu just like anything else. Both services identify the episode from its own play link:

A Deezer or Spotify episode shows its show name only sometimes: the browse row those services hand over carries just the episode title and a description, so the show has to come from the service's own metadata cache — which is filled if you reached the episode by browsing its show, and empty if you didn't. Either way the episode saves, plays and marks itself Played exactly the same; it's only the subtitle that may be shorter.

Qobuz, Tidal and Bandcamp have no podcasts, so there's nothing to save there.

A Deezer or Spotify episode plays through that service, exactly as it would if you'd started it from the service's own menu.

There's no Add to Wish List for a podcast — you don't buy podcast episodes. This holds for both services. The entry can still appear over an episode, because Material builds a menu per surface rather than per row: in a mixed list such as Favourites, and on a Deezer or Spotify episode browsed inside that service's own app. Pressing it saves the episode to Listen Later instead, and the confirmation says so; Move to Wish List isn't offered on the saved row either.

Whole shows can't be saved — only episodes. A podcast series isn't a release: it has no end, and it changes under you, so "have you finished it" has no answer. Adding a show rather than an episode is refused on Deezer and Spotify alike.

The three lists

Open Apps → Listen Later and you'll see one page with three headed sections, each showing a live count:

• Listen Later — your main queue of things to hear.
• Wish List — albums you intend to buy. Never auto-played and never auto-removed.
• Played — albums you've already heard (auto-tidied; see below).

Moving & removing

Each album row's "… → More" menu offers Move to … for the two lists it isn't in, plus Remove from list. The list refreshes in place.

Playing

Tap an album to play it. Library albums play from your library; streaming albums replay through the service they came from (falling back to that service's own search if the original reference is gone).

Buy on Bandcamp

For a Bandcamp album, the "… → More" menu has Buy on Bandcamp, which opens the album's Bandcamp page in your browser. The page link is found on first use and cached; if the exact page can't be matched it falls back to a Bandcamp search.

Automatic Played tracking

With Automatically move albums to Played on (the default), a Listen Later item moves to Played once you've heard most of it — whether you started playback from the list or anywhere else (Material, the app, a streaming page). Only Listen Later items are watched; Wish List items are left alone.

• A multi-track release is judged on how many of its tracks you've played — see the thresholds in Settings. Streaming releases remember how many tracks they hold, measured from the release's real track listing the first time you play it (or in the background shortly after adding, where that's free), so the same most of it percentage applies to them as to your library albums. The fixed streaming count below is only a fallback for a release whose length couldn't be measured at all.
• The percentage rounds down, so a skipped track — or one that isn't available in your country — never leaves a release stuck. At the default 90%, a nine-track album needs eight of its tracks and a five-track one needs four. A two-track release always needs both, since needing only one would mark it the instant it started.
• How long a release is comes from counting it, never from what it's called. Album, EP and Single are labels from MusicBrainz or the streaming service, and they're often not literal — a release labelled Single can hold three tracks, and one labelled EP can hold a single track. Those labels are shown on the row, but they never decide when something has been heard. Only the real, playable track listing does, so a release still moves to Played whatever it's called and whichever of its tracks are available in your country.
• Anything that's a single track (a saved track, a Single, or a podcast episode) is marked Played once you've actually listened to ~90% of it. Skipping past it doesn't count, and pausing doesn't either — it goes on real playback, not elapsed time — so something you skimmed past won't quietly move to Played and then be tidied away.

Material home shelf

On the Material Skin home screen you can show a horizontal Listen Later row of your saved albums, each playable/tappable. It uses Material's standard home-extra mechanism (no skin patching). If it isn't shown, enable it under Material's home-screen customisation.

Sorting

A single Default sort order applies to all three lists: Recently added, Artist, Album, Year, or Recently played.

A note on release years. Albums from your own library and from Qobuz or Spotify carry their year, as do any added through ListenBrainz New Releases or Pitchfork Reviews. Albums added straight from Tidal, Deezer or Bandcamp don't: those plugins hand over a release's track listing rather than its details, so there's no date to read. Adding the same release through one of the companion plugins gets you the year. It's worth having where it's available — the year is part of how a duplicate is recognised, so two copies of an album saved with and without one aren't spotted as the same record.

Settings reference

Open Settings → Advanced → Listen Later (also linked as Plugin Settings at the top of the plugin's page).

Notes & limitations

• Album-add from streaming is reached from a track or album row in the service's browse view; there's no global LMS hook to inject an item into every service's own album "…" menu, so the plugin uses Slim::Menu::TrackInfo/AlbumInfo plus Material's custom-action mechanism.
• **Adding directly from a streaming service's *browse list*** (e.g. a New Releases row) relies on a Material Skin feature that was merged upstream (lms-material #1235) and ships in Material 6.4.4 and later. On older Material that one entry just won't appear — adding from an album's or track's own "…" menu (and everything else) works regardless.
• Outside-the-plugin Played detection is reliable for the local library (matched by album id); for streaming it's best-effort, matched on the now-playing artist + album.
• Material custom actions on home-shelf cards only appear after you've opened a streaming browse page in the same session — a Material limitation in how the home shelves render menus.
• **Internet-radio stations don't show Add.** Radio is a live stream, not something you can save and replay, so the Add to Listen Later / Add to Wish List entries are deliberately hidden on radio browse rows (BBC Sounds, TuneIn's Music/News/Sports/… categories, etc.). This applies to radio browse rows; a radio card on a Material home shelf can't be suppressed the same way, but adding one there is simply ignored. (After updating, reload Material once — Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+R — so it re-reads its custom-actions file.)
• A whole podcast show can't be saved, only an episode. A series has no end and changes under you, so it isn't something you can finish. Adding one is refused rather than saved as a row that could never play.
• Saving an individual track needs the Material Skin. On the classic skin a track's "…" menu offers the album it belongs to, which is what that menu has always been able to reach.
• Storage is a SQLite database in the server cache directory, so your lists survive restarts and rescans.