About

Listening time is not taste.

Every streaming service ranks your music by how long you left it playing. That measures convenience - the album you fell asleep to, the track the algorithm kept handing back, the one from the advert. notch.fm asks the question none of them ask: what do you actually think of this song?

What it is

notch.fm sits on top of the Spotify library you already have. You give a song a score out of ten, and you tag it in your own words. Then you stop building playlists by hand, because the library can answer questions.

  • A score, 1 to 10. One number, set by you, that no amount of listening history can fake.
  • Four named tag axes - genre, mood, vibe and sound - plus a custom axis you define yourself, because the thing that separates your favourites is rarely a genre.
  • One search box. Ask in plain English. It reads the sentence, turns it into a filter, and runs the filter against your ratings. notchbot answers questions about your own library in the same box.
  • Queues and playlists assembled from what you scored highest, saveable to Spotify as real playlists.
  • Comments pinned to a moment. A note left at 2:14 stays at 2:14 for everyone who plays the song.
  • XP, 50 levels and 25 badges, because the honest problem with a library of four thousand songs is the first afternoon.
  • A feed and community charts. What the people you follow rated, and what everybody who opted in rates highest - ranked by average, not by plays.

What it is not

It is not a streaming service and it does not host any music. Playback happens in Spotify, through Spotify, on your own account - notch.fm drives the transport and reads what is playing. It is an independent project and is not affiliated with Spotify.

It is also not an algorithm pretending to know you. Nothing here is inferred from audio analysis: Spotify grants no audio-features data to apps created after November 2024, and the app is better for it. The only signal that matters is the one you set on purpose.

Who builds it

One person, working on it because their own liked-songs list got too big to shuffle. That is why the app tells you when something is not built rather than dressing it up, and why the pages under Legal read like a description of the code instead of a template.

If something is wrong, get in touch. If you want to see what has changed, there is a changelog. If you want your data back, it is a button in Settings and it is described honestly on the privacy page.

Music itself, and everything about your account, stays with Spotify - you can review or revoke notch.fm’s access at spotify.com/account/apps whenever you like.