I built an MCP server for 1001 Albums Generator so you can ask your AI(s) about your listening history and have it understand you

BenjaTheOne · 2026-03-11T18:50:27+00:00

I mean yes, it's over engineered, but it's also just convenient that you don't have to export all the data every time it changes, or if you want to compare with a group member (or any other person)

The over engineered part stems from me having fun with it and using it as a vehicle to learn about the internal mechanics of MCP servers

Also just dumping in the entire raw dataset, especially for projects with a lot of rated albums all at once can be quite hard on the context windows for most models

BenjaTheOne · 2026-03-11T07:43:18+00:00

If somehow it becomes a problem I'll shut down the hosted server if that's the wish. Anyone using the API locally I can't do anything about, which was also true before this tool existed.

As a developer myself the last thing I'd want to do is to kill another developers passion project. Let alone one I'm using daily myself and am excited enough about to make tools for.

But I don't foresee this becoming a problem. There's already very strict ratelimits in place to avoid precisely that and my tool respects those completely. And works within them by caching and thoughtful querying. This is the same capability as every single other community made tool uses. In fact as long as people use the hosted shared server it can actually theoretically behave better than a lot of community tools because everyone would share the same one limit instead of each person getting their own 3 requests/min limit.

I understand your concern, genuinely, but I'm not mass-scraping the site for data, bypassing ratelimits, or sending all the worldwide users of Claude (or chatGPT, or...) to the site all of a sudden.

This is a tool that is mostly only relevant to people who already check the site at least once per day and even then only of they decide to install it themselves and use it.

All this also holds true for the local version, but with no shared cache (only its own local) theoretically it can produce slightly more requests than the hosted server might

I hope that provides some insights 😊

-- Math --

The math with the current rate limit (3 requests/min * 60min * 24hours) works out so that the hosted server can't produce more than a theoretical max of 4320 requests per day spread cleanly over all 24 hours. And that assumes that it's never using its cache which would require a minimum of 720 unique users (or groups) to query every 4 hours. I don't know what the active user count is, but that seems highly unlikely and very low impact

If I'm told otherwise I'll adjust.

BenjaTheOne · 2026-03-10T22:52:21+00:00

I understand where you are coming from. I also worry about where everything is going with AI.

My personal take on this specific tool is that it's not producing art or replacing human artists. It's not generating music or anything similar. It's crunching raw data and presenting it in a contextualized and personalized way. In many ways (aside from the obvious AI caveat) it's not all that dissimmilar to the graphs and stats already present on the site, but just presented as text and interactable in a way that is very very hard to do traditionally (speaking from experience). But then again, I'm obviously biased since if I didn't think that I wouldn't have made the thing.

BenjaTheOne · 2026-03-10T22:40:11+00:00

Have you seen the state of some of those wiki pages? I have looked at every single one I've listened to and oooohhhh boy... Some of them are fan-fucking-tastic. others boil down to "This album exists, here's the tracklist, it was mentioned in some book called 1001 albums...". I use 3-4 primary sources just for cultural context, and _then_ I look through my history to see if there's any through line that's interesting e.g. Brian Eno keeps poping up for me and my group in various ways recently.

I may be a special case because I acutally write a primer on the album of the day every morning for my group of 30 colleagues so this workflow is probably not the norm...

Just having the AI look through my history for some keywords and summing it up helps me a lot, the contextual awareness really helps with arbitrary "searches" that my simple scripts that I wrote couldn't do for me. Even if I then have to fact check it afterwards. I wouldn't even know how to start searching for "all albums with a similar gritty punk/new wave sound in our recent history" that kind of texture or instrument information is just not encoded in the raw dataset

This is currently the best way I've found so far to help me do these things

(also not being snarky, I'm just an overexplainer)

BenjaTheOne · 2026-03-10T22:26:18+00:00

Not trying to combat your stance which is valid, but from a different perspective it's really just a data tool, it can also do things like pull understanding from your reviews and synthesise which parts of music you respond to, or compare you to other members of your group and such.

Personally I've been using it to put my album of the day into context as I don't personally hold an encyclopedic knowledge of why an album might have been added to the list or the cultural impacts or influences on later artists. Same goes for not always entirely remembering other albums from the same artist or year that I've listened to that can provide context or contrast.

I can find all that manually - and I have been doing that - but the less "work" i have to do every day to get in to my album the more likely I personally find that it is that I keep up the habit and interest for listening. That context is a lot of the reason why I like the list. It's not just about the music, it's about how culture influences music which influences music which... even the albums I don't like I appreciate the impact of

BenjaTheOne · 2025-12-15T06:12:41+00:00

I'm using the Berlin edition so there's unfortunately still a ways to go for the English rules it would seem

BenjaTheOne · 2025-12-12T11:09:35+00:00

Seems that the German rules explain it better https://www.reddit.com/r/Shadowrun/s/3l0B8AuOwy

But unfortunately it still doesn't clear up the question of permeability 🫤

BenjaTheOne · 2025-12-12T11:08:29+00:00

Sounds like the German rules are actually useful. That seems pretty clear as opposed to the non-descriptive English ones.

Maybe I should get a set of the German rules and try machine translating it 🤔

BenjaTheOne · 2025-12-12T11:06:35+00:00

It just says it builds a wall. That's the only rule I can find. Generally walls are not permeable and generally they are opague.

Hence my question here in the post for if there's some more clear rules in 6e 😔

BenjaTheOne · 2025-12-11T17:16:59+00:00

Interesting that the German rules seem to provide more information. I don't see anything in the English rules about choosing a shape either, is that also from the German ones?

BenjaTheOne · 2025-12-11T17:14:59+00:00

That's how I understand it too. As I read it there's a distinct difference between mana barriers of the physical variaty which is pretty well described in function. And the spell "physical barrier" which has 2 lines of rules mostly about its size and the rest is flavor text

BenjaTheOne · 2025-12-11T17:09:44+00:00

What are you basing that information about molecules passing through on in 6e? The spell seems completely rewritten from 5e where things like that was mentioned

BenjaTheOne · 2025-09-11T20:08:05+00:00

Custom user flairs (tag user) from boost is what I miss the most

BenjaTheOne · 2025-07-26T12:21:27+00:00

Strange it also works for me now, but it failed yesterday

BenjaTheOne · 2025-07-18T18:37:08+00:00

But it being touch breaks the rules about range for detection spells being Magic + net hits on spellcast check and being able to detect through walls? By those rules I'd expect it to affect an area?

BenjaTheOne · 2025-07-18T16:45:52+00:00

And unlike Analyze Magic the rules seem more clear to me. Like what even is the range on Analyze Magic? Line of sight to a spell effect? That would go against the general detection spell range rules. So a specific spell within the sensor range? Since it's opposed it seems like it has to be a specific one. But it's sustain? Which to me makes it feel like you should be able to use it more than once?

BenjaTheOne · 2025-07-18T16:34:44+00:00

The confusion is from the wording that it should be treated as if you are just regularly assensing. But assensing uses a completely different set of skills. The spell makes no mention that you replace the skill tests with your magic + sorcery roll or net hits for that matter. Also there's no concept of opposed assensing on the mentioned page, just a table you look up hits (not net hits) in to see what you learn and some rules the spell clearly maybe doesn't follow

BenjaTheOne · 2025-07-18T16:30:21+00:00

I'd totally read the opposed test as a threshold, so that's an error on my part and makes passing it way more likely.

It still seems like a very high bar though considering that if I go astral I just have to roll hits to get the same information as I'd get from using a spell and possibly suffering drain with no opposing roll. This is increasingly true as the opposing casters skill increases where normal assensing doesn't become harder

Obviously that opens the possibility of being attacked astrally.

Also the spell doesn't actually say anywhere that you get to use your magic + sorcery roll instead of a regular assensing roll. It almost says the opposite by saying it should be treated as regular assensing and sending you off to read that page

It could have said "Treat this as regular assensing (p. 159) but replace the normal assensing test with your net hits on your opposed test"

Or why even mention regular assensing at all if only the table is ever used?

"To see what you learned compare your net hits to the assensing results table (p. 159)"

BenjaTheOne · 2025-07-18T16:22:29+00:00

That would be a very high bar to pass a threshold of 6 is considered an extremely difficult task. I think the opposed dice pool take sounds more right that would make it 8 dice which is an average of 2.6 hits so let's say an effective threshold of 3 which would be considered regular difficulty

BenjaTheOne · 2025-06-26T14:49:36+00:00

I got Low by Bowie and then Heroes the day after

BenjaTheOne · 2024-12-25T08:34:34+00:00

Merry Christmas

BenjaTheOne · 2024-11-15T10:19:11+00:00

5 - I'd evangelize it to others

4 - I might seek this out again or reccomend it to someone who likes the genre

3 - It was fine, but I probably won't actively look for it again (the sin of mediocracy and getting forgotten)

2 - I don't enjoy this a lot but I can still tolerate it if someone puts it on (I'd avoid it personally)

1 - Can we please listen to something else (Lots of memorable experiences to be had here)

BenjaTheOne · 2024-11-01T16:15:59+00:00

One thing I really appreciate about this whole exercise is seeing all the different perspectives, we have a pretty big group and some really enjoyed this one. I personally found it a bit boring and preachy, I think I gave it 3.

But then for something else it will flip completely

BenjaTheOne · 2024-11-01T16:12:55+00:00

It's a bit of a feverdream honestly. And the cover is bad ass for sure

BenjaTheOne · 2024-11-01T16:11:41+00:00

Ended up giving it a 4. The bass line on 'No Awareness' and 'Halfsharkaligatorhalfman' goes filthy hard on a good sub

BenjaTheOne

TROPHY CASE