| name | nowplaying-setup-accounts |
| description | Use when the user needs to generate the third-party credentials Now Playing requires — currently just a Discogs personal access token. Triggers on phrases like "set up my discogs account", "get a discogs token", "discogs api key", "accounts", "credentials", "what api keys do I need". |
Now Playing — accounts and credentials
Now Playing runs without any third-party credentials. A Discogs personal access token is recommended — it gives the kiosk canonical pressing metadata, local art scans, and the /identify browse flow — but if you skip this phase the kiosk still gets album art, tracklist, side timer, and BEST GUESS via MusicBrainz auto-discovery on the no-Discogs path. This skill walks the user through generating the token. It isn't installed anywhere yet — it gets pasted into pi/.env during the next phase.
Why Discogs is recommended (not required)
The kiosk's identity layer is strongest when it has the user's own Discogs collection. When a track is recognized, the orchestrator looks up which release in the user's collection it belongs to — that's where canonical album art, tracklist, year, label, and pressing info come from. With a Discogs token, you also get the /identify browse flow and your own scanned cover art.
Without a token, the orchestrator falls back to MusicBrainz: it auto-discovers the release in the background, persists it to pi/data/discovered.sqlite, and the kiosk still shows album art, tracklist, side timer, and BEST GUESS. The fingerprint cascade still works (MBID-keyed instead of Discogs-keyed).
You don't need a large collection — even a handful of releases gets the system running so you can see it identify those records. If you'd rather skip Discogs entirely, that's supported — just tell Claude.
Step 1: Have a Discogs account
If the user doesn't already have one, send them to https://www.discogs.com/users/create. Free. Optionally add some releases to their collection — minimum one to actually see recognitions, but the install can proceed with an empty collection.
Step 2: Generate a personal access token
- Go to https://www.discogs.com/settings/developers.
- Click Generate new token (under "Developers" / "Personal access token").
- Copy the token immediately — Discogs shows it once. It looks like a long alphanumeric string.
That's the entire OAuth — Discogs personal tokens authenticate the same user account that generated them, no OAuth dance required.
Step 3: Confirm the token works
The token will be tested for real during nowplaying-setup-install's catalog sync step. If the user wants to sanity-check it now, a one-line curl works:
curl -s -H "Authorization: Discogs token=<paste-token-here>" \
"https://api.discogs.com/oauth/identity"
A working token returns JSON containing username and id. A bad token returns {"message": "You must authenticate to access this resource."}.
Step 4: Hand the token to the next phase
Don't write it anywhere yet. The next phase (nowplaying-setup-install) creates pi/.env and pastes the token in — keeping it scoped to that file is the right place.
If the user wants to write it down briefly, the macOS Notes app or a password manager is fine; don't paste it into chat history or anywhere that gets committed to git.
You're done with this phase when
- The user has a Discogs personal access token they can paste, or they've decided to skip Discogs and run on the MusicBrainz-only path.
- (Optional) The curl identity check returned their username.
Next
Ask Claude to "install the software" → nowplaying-setup-install.
Skip option
If the user wants to skip Discogs entirely, hand off straight to nowplaying-setup-install without setting DISCOGS_TOKEN in .env. The orchestrator tolerates a missing discogs.sqlite and routes everything through the MusicBrainz discovery path.
When to switch skills
- The user wants to skip Discogs entirely → supported. Move on to
nowplaying-setup-install and leave DISCOGS_TOKEN unset; the kiosk will use MusicBrainz auto-discovery for album-art, tracklist, side timer, and BEST GUESS.
- They get a 401 from the identity check with a freshly-generated token → re-generate the token and try again; tokens can be copied with leading/trailing whitespace which the API rejects.
What this skill is NOT
There are no other accounts you need. Discogs is the only optional credential. Album art is fetched live from MusicBrainz / Cover Art Archive, which doesn't require an account.
