MelodyBridge

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Soulseek and slskd ​

The Soulseek plugin pulls lossless FLAC and high-bitrate MP3 or AAC files from Soulseek peers. It does not talk to the network itself: it drives slskd, the well-maintained Soulseek client and daemon, over its REST API. That keeps the peer connection, the queueing and the share handling in one place, and MelodyBridge only has to search and collect the finished file.

Setup ​

  1. Run slskd where MelodyBridge can reach it, with a Soulseek account. Any free username works; the network registers new names on first login.

  2. Give slskd folders for its downloads and incomplete transfers, and share at least some music. Peers regularly refuse downloads from empty shares.

  3. Create a read-write API key in slskd's slskd.yml:

    yaml
    web:
  authentication:
    api_keys:
      - key: a-long-random-string
        role: readwrite

  4. On the Plugins page, open the Soulseek card's Settings row and fill in the slskd URL (http://127.0.0.1:5030 by default) and the API key. MelodyBridge asks slskd where it writes finished downloads and reads the file from there, so that folder must be visible to MelodyBridge too, at the same path. When the paths differ (a container mount), set the path MelodyBridge sees under Advanced.

The plugin reports itself unavailable until the URL and API key are set, slskd is logged in to the network, and its downloads folder can be read, so a half-finished setup never costs waterfall time.

How a download runs ​

The plugin searches the network, skips locked files and containers it does not declare, and ranks the rest on the usual title, artist and duration match. Lossless files and peers with a free upload slot break ties. The transfer is enqueued on the peer and polled until it finishes, then the file is moved out of slskd's downloads folder into the playlist folder.

Soulseek transfers can sit in a peer's queue for a long time. The waterfall's plugin time budget (four minutes by default, on the Advanced page) ends that wait; raise it when you want MelodyBridge to wait longer for slow peers. Drag the plugin above yt-dlp on the Plugins page when Soulseek should be tried before YouTube.