Bug-Man’s Blog

Justin has been having some difficulties with the iScrobbler client that lets you scrobble your tracks to Last.fm. If you don’t know what Last.fm is, it is a website that trends your music listening over time, and lets you link to your friends as well as strangers who have similar tastes in music to you. Of the things I don’t use it for, you can play music through the website as well as create radio stations, post blogs etc. But one of the best things about it is that it knows about all of the artists that nobody’s ever heard of — the ones I listen to! The entire database is community driven/build which is what makes it so great.

Just for good measure, here’s my feed:

The normal Last.fm client is a rather bloated piece of crapware so it’s no surprise that people don’t want to use it. I have used it for quite some time because I found that previous versions of iScrobbler failed miserably and crashed a lot. Annoyingly when you search for iScrobbler in Google, one of the top hits is an out-dated version on Sourceforge, which is probably why I have had so much trouble previously. That version hasn’t been updated since 2002. All hail the new version!

I have read on the Internet that iPod submissions don’t seem to work very well because once you scrobble data to Last.fm and then try and scrobble data from a time earlier than your last scrobble, it will fail on those submissions (Say you listen on your laptop, go for a walk, come back, listen more, then sync your iPod — those iPod tracks won’t scrobble!) The client uses the Recently Played playlist to work out what it needs to scrobble. I’m going to run some tests and see how the new iScrobbler client behaves with the iPod. Now that I actually have an iPod, scrobbling my history from it is rather important to me.

Test #1 – Installation!

Initial tests for iScrobbler 2.0 are good; it installs and runs without crashing. It’s more advanced than any previous version I have used, which is a good sign. It detected my previous bloated Last.fm client which I have disabled. It has an option for iPod sync which I have selected.

Test #2 – Scrobbling

As I write this I am waiting for one track to scrobble that I have listened to in full…. and it has scrobbled successfully, proving that full communication back to the Last.fm server is working properly. This is good news.

Test #3 – Listening on my iPod

I played four tracks on my iPod. When I plugged it in to sync, iScrobbler paused track submission on the client (nothing was playing anyway) and successfully scrobbled the tracks I played.

Test #4 – Listening on my iPod and iTunes mish-mashed, then performing an iPod Sync

Alright! I’ve plugged my iPod back in and I’m listening to music again. A couple of tracks on the iPod, a couple of tracks on iTunes, then back to the iPod, then one more on iTunes for good measure. It will be interesting to see how the client handles this mish-mash of history, considering the tunes I play from within iTunes will scrobble automatically.

Theoretically the tunes on the iPod will be cast down as un-scrobbable because they pre-date the latest submission. If it fails here, it’s painful, because it will mean making sure you plug in your iPod EVERY SINGLE TIME you finish with it. Damn, if only it my iPod had wireless.

I got a bit confused during my track playing and lost track of what was doing, and I think I went:

ipod
ipod
itunes
ipod
itunes

So for good measure I added in another few tracks:

itunes
ipod
ipod
itunes

There! That should be plenty to play with. I’ve kept the track titles properly recorded in a text file this time so I can be sure of my results when I compare it to the Last.fm website.

And the results?

“No Matching Tracks”. This is the message you get if there are no tracks to scrobble. So yes, quite simply this means you can’t scrobble your “historical” data and you MUST sync your iPod before using iTunes (with iScrobbler enabled anyway) otherwise you WILL NOT be able to Scrobble your iPod’s history. This isn’t a fault of the client as far as I can tell, rather, it’s a fault of the submissions system being unable to receive out of sequence scrobbles.

The application is awesome and I will continue to use it. I will just have to remember to sync my iPod more regularly!!