Track or album, and why the difference matters
Music is the one universe in the app where the unit is not obvious. You can log a single track or a whole album, and the two live in the same collection: a record that defined your year and a song you had on loop for a week are different things, and forcing both into one shape would make the list lie about both.
Search returns both and says which is which. An album carries the year and genre from the record's own entry; a track inherits them from the album it appeared on, which is the information that actually exists: a song has no genre of its own in the catalog, it has the album's.
The year does not appear on a song's identity line, and that is deliberate: a film's year is the work, a track's year is the edition it came out on, and that changes from compilation to compilation without saying anything about the song.
The thirty-second preview, and what it is not
Every track comes with a short preview that plays inside the app while you decide whether it is the right one. It exists to settle which of the four versions with the same name you are actually looking for, which is the real problem with logging music.
What it is not: a streaming service. You cannot listen to the album here, there is no play queue and there is no download. The preview is courtesy of the catalog and is credited as such; actual listening happens on the service you already use, and the link is on the item itself.
The catalog is Deezer, chosen because it is public, needs no key and returns the preview and the cover in the same response. One consequence: a track's detail sheet is thinner than a film's, because Deezer publishes no synopsis, and an empty field under a section heading is worse than no field, so it simply does not appear.
What logging music you have already heard is for
Your streaming service already knows what you listened to, and it makes a yearly recap. The difference is that it counts PLAYS, and a play is not an opinion: the record that played three hundred times because it sat on shuffle at work shows up ahead of the record that changed your year.
Here you are the one who says. The rating is yours, the date is the one you chose, and the collection is your reading of what happened, not an algorithm's tally. That is why logging is manual: the effort of choosing is exactly what the automatic recap does not have.
And, like the rest of the app, this does not sit alone in a music app. The same profile that holds the records holds the films and books from the same year, and that mix is what friends comment on.
The year in records, without relying on anyone's recap
Every December streaming services publish a recap of your year, and every January it disappears. It belongs to the service, not to you: switch platforms and the history stays behind, and the one from two years ago is already nowhere.
Here the recap is built from what YOU logged, and it still exists the following year, and the one after. It mixes universes on purpose: the record of the year next to the film and the book of the year is a reading no single service can produce, because none of them can see the others.
And it is shareable by link, without forcing anyone to sign up to see it. Same idea as collections: whoever receives it opens an ordinary page, with the covers and what you wrote.
Logging is manual, and that is the price. In exchange, what is in there is what you chose to be in there, not what played most often on shuffle while you were working.