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 is where you say what you actually think of a song. You give it a score out of ten, and you tag it in your own words. Then you stop building playlists by hand, because a library that knows what you think can answer questions.
It works on its own. Search, rate and tag without connecting anything. Connect Apple Music or Spotify and it also plays, and brings across the library you already have.
- 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. They live here whatever you are connected to, and push across to a service as real playlists when there is one.
- 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. When you connect a service, playback happens there, on your own account, and notch.fm reads what is playing. It is an independent project and is not affiliated with Spotify or Apple.
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, so there is none to be tempted by, and the app is better for it. The only signal that matters is the one you set on purpose, which is also the only one that survives you changing service.
Who builds it#
Its founder, working alone, 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 at a service, stays with that service. You can review or revoke notch.fm’s access whenever you like: Spotify at spotify.com/account/apps, Apple Music in your Apple Account settings.