Scrobbling from Plex with a webhook
How it works
Plex has a webhook system: when something notable happens on your server (playback starts, finishes, is scrobbled), Plex sends a small message to any URLs you've registered. Stick gives every account a personal, secret webhook URL. Register it in Plex, and whenever a music track passes Plex's own "counts as played" threshold, 90% of the track, Plex tells Stick, and Stick records the play with the artist, album, track and the real time it happened.
Requirement: webhooks are a Plex Pass feature, the Plex account that owns the server needs an active subscription for Plex to send them. That's a Plex-side restriction, not a Stick one; Stick's side is free.
Setting it up
- In Stick, go to Settings → Connections and find Plex webhook URL.
- Click Copy. The URL contains a token unique to your account, treat it like a password.
- Open Plex Web and go to Settings → Webhooks (under your account settings, not the server's).
- Click Add Webhook, paste the URL, and save.
- Play a song from your Plex library all the way through. Within moments of hitting the 90% mark it appears in your Stick library.
What gets recorded (and what doesn't)
- Only music is recorded, tracks from Plex music libraries. Movies, TV and podcasts trigger webhooks too, but Stick ignores anything that isn't a music track.
- Only completed listens count. Plex fires the play event at 90% playback, so skipped and sampled tracks never pollute your history.
- Plays are recorded with their actual timestamps, unlike Apple Music live tracking, there's no approximation here, because Plex reports the event as it happens.
- It works from any player connected to your server: Plexamp on your phone, Plex on the TV, the web player at your desk.
About that token
The token in your webhook URL is what tells Stick the play is yours, there's no password exchange, so the URL itself is the credential. If it ever leaks (pasted a screenshot of your Plex settings somewhere public?), click Regenerate in Settings → Connections. The old URL stops working immediately; update Plex with the new one and you're done. Nothing already recorded is affected.
Where Plex plays fit in your library
Plex plays are first-class citizens: they count toward your stats and streaks, show their source in the per-source breakdown, and get matched against MusicBrainz like everything else, which is where good tagging pays off. If your files are tagged with the standard artist/album/track names (or better yet, tagged from MusicBrainz with a tool like Picard), matches are instant and album art appears by itself. Idiosyncratic tags may land a few plays in Needs Attention, where they're quick to fix, and the fix teaches Stick for every future play of the same track.
One nice property of the webhook approach: it captures listening that no streaming service ever sees. Your Plex plays are usually the part of your music life that's invisible to every stats service, with the webhook wired up, your Stick history is finally the whole picture, streaming and local together, de-duplicated and consistent.