I’ve been scrobbling my music listening activity to Last.fm since 2005. It’s one of the oldest music sites out there and it reveals fascinating things about myself like I listen to way too much Animal Crossing music. But now that there are a huge number of streaming music services it’s harder than ever to keep track of what we listen to. Thankfully, Last.fm is pretty open with their API and people are largely free to create software, plugins and apps that can scrobble listening activity back to your profile.
I’ve been listening to music on Bandcamp and Songza a lot lately and it finally sent me looking for a way to scrobble my activity from websites. That’s when I found Scroblr, an extension for Chrome and Safari browsers that pulls in listening activity from nearly 30 different places. With the changing nature of web coding, however, it’s good to keep the old saying “your milage may vary” in mind. I tried out the major sites and some random ones that I still had accounts for and found that most worked flawlessly.
Bandcamp, Google Play Music, Songza, Pandora, and Xbox Music all scrobbled without a hitch. YouTube worked as well and it’s worth noting that you have to click the Scroblr icon and confirm each video submission. This lets you define the track info any way you want and keeps it from scrobbling cat videos, movie trailers and Vine compilations as music. Unfortunately, two big hitters that didn’t work for me were Amazon Cloud Player and SoundCloud. At the same time, though, recent user reviews claim successes and failures all over the board so it seems like there’s a bit of random luck involved.
There are other variations of this plugin out there to try as well but for the sites I use, Scroblr is all I needed and is definitely worth trying if you’ve been looking for the same solution. Do you scrobble your music to Last.fm or keep track of it elsewhere? Where do you listen to video game music these days? Actually, hold that thought, it’d make for a good post of its own.
Tags: Google Chrome, Last.fm, Music Streaming, Plugins, Safari, Scroblr
I’ve been scrobbling since 2006 myself, and soundtracks make up a huge portion of that, video games in particular. I used to play my music via Winamp back in the day, but ever since i got my first iPhone i switched over to iTunes. I don’t listen to music on other places too often, mostly only to check out new stuff to see if it’s worth getting. And here comes the crux with plugin such as Scroblr: they easily mess up my tags. I’m one of those that like to keep their last.fm library as clean as possible. No duplicates, no wrong tags; and with a plugin such as this, you have no control over what gets scrobbled. Still, it’s great that this thing exists 🙂
Aw yeah, Winamp! I was pretty much in the same boat but instead of an iPhone I got a Zune which is immensely clunky to scrobble from. I can totally respect wanting to keep your Last.fm clean and pure but for me as long as it dumps some name I can recognize, I’m good. You can use the pencil icon to edit some of the info but I don’t know if I’d trust it 100% and then it just makes more work cleaning up.
Wow that was unusual. I just wrote an incredibly long comment but after
I clicked submit my comment didn’t show up. Grrrr…
well I’m not writing all that over again. Anyway, just wanted to
say great blog!