Show HN: Silver Music Notifier – get notified about your artists' new releases

Silver Music Notifier, a new open-source tool, lets users track artists and receive notifications of new music releases via terminal or local web UI. The tool integrates with MusicBrainz and supports email alerts, requiring Node 22+.

Track a list of artists and get notified of their new music releases from MusicBrainz https://musicbrainz.org . Use it from the terminal, or launch a local web UI built with silver-ui https://silver-ui.com . npm install -g silver-music-notifier Requires Node 22+. silver-music-notifier web starts on http://localhost:3001 and opens a browser silver-music-notifier web --port 8080 --no-open The UI has three views: Releases — a feed of every known release-group, newest first, with a Refresh button and a "New" badge on releases discovered in the last refresh. Artists — search MusicBrainz and add/remove the artists you follow. Settings — set the MusicBrainz contact required , choose notification methods, and configure SMTP for email. silver-music-notifier add "Radiohead" search MusicBrainz, pick a match silver-music-notifier add "Boards of Canada" -y add the top match, no prompt silver-music-notifier add "X" --mbid <mbid add an exact MBID silver-music-notifier list list tracked artists silver-music-notifier remove "Radiohead" stop tracking by name or MBID silver-music-notifier refresh fetch releases + notify on new ones silver-music-notifier refresh --no-notify fetch without sending email silver-music-notifier releases --new --limit 20 silver-music-notifier dismiss <release-mbid hide a release's New badge silver-music-notifier config get show settings silver-music-notifier config set notify.email true silver-music-notifier clear-data delete artists/releases, keep settings MusicBrainz requires every API client to identify a contact an email or URL in its User-Agent, and throttles or blocks requests without one. The first time you run most CLI commands, the CLI prompts you for a contact and saves it. Non-network setup commands such as config set , clear-data , and dismiss can run before the contact is configured. You can also set it ahead of time: silver-music-notifier config set musicbrainz.contact you@example.com or in the web UI's Settings view after the app has launched. In a non-interactive context no TTY , commands that require the contact error with this guidance instead of prompting. When refresh finds releases it has never seen before, it can notify you two ways: In-page badges — "New" badges in the web UI always available . Email — one HTML email per new release, sent once SMTP is configured and the email toggle is on. Configure it in the Settings view or via config set smtp.host , smtp.port , smtp.secure , smtp.user , smtp.pass , smtp.from , and smtp.to . Adding a new artist refreshes that artist immediately, but treats the existing catalog as your starting baseline: it does not send email for those releases or mark them with "New" badges. refresh is manual — run it from the CLI, the web button, or your own scheduler cron, systemd timer, etc. . To check for new releases on a schedule, first make sure the CLI has the required MusicBrainz contact and any notification settings configured: silver-music-notifier config set musicbrainz.contact you@example.com silver-music-notifier config set notify.email true optional, if SMTP is configured Then add a cron entry. This example refreshes every day at 9:00 AM: 0 9 /usr/bin/env silver-music-notifier refresh "$HOME/.local/share/silver-music-notifier/cron.log" 2 &1 If cron cannot find the command, use the full path from command -v silver-music-notifier . To use a custom database location, set SILVER MUSIC NOTIFIER DATA DIR in the cron line: 0 9 SILVER MUSIC NOTIFIER DATA DIR="$HOME/.local/share/silver-music-notifier" /usr/bin/env silver-music-notifier refresh "$HOME/.local/share/silver-music-notifier/cron.log" 2 &1 State lives in a single SQLite file data.db in your per-user data directory: Linux: $XDG DATA HOME/silver-music-notifier usually ~/.local/share/silver-music-notifier macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/silver-music-notifier Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\silver-music-notifier\Data Override the location with the SILVER MUSIC NOTIFIER DATA DIR environment variable. Note:SMTP credentials including the password are stored in plaintext in that local SQLite file. This is a single-user local tool; treat the data directory accordingly. Notification methods in-page / email and the MusicBrainz contact are configured in the web UI's Settings view or via silver-music-notifier config set … — not through environment variables.