Anyone for a quick game of scrobble?

Ever since I got my iPod I’ve wanted to find a way to list my ‘recently played’ tracks on this Blogsite.  There are a few WordPress plugins and widgets that claim to do this, but they all seemed overly-complicated, requiring additional e-mail accounts, modified server permissions, and god knows what else.  So what with having a life to live and all, I never found the time to dig into them and get any of them working properly.

Then last week a buddy responded to a post of mine in the Music category, mentioning Last.fm which he said tracked people’s listening habits.  I checked it out and saw that it built personal listening charts that you could put on your Weblog, so I signed up, and downloaded the software, to see what it would do.  Sure enough, with almost no effort on my part (always a key factor!) it tracked whatever I listened to through iTunes, and built me a nice Ten Most Recently Played table (albeit with what seems like an hour’s delay) that I could then include in my ‘blog sidebar (look, there it is down on the bottom right of this page!). Very nice!

But then I noticed that it wasn’t tracking what I played on my iPod – only what I played via iTunes.  Given that I do most of my listening on my iPod (thanks to a nice relaxed regime at work that allows me to sit there wired for sound all day) this struck me as a major shortfall.  After a couple of hours of trawling through the Last.fm FAQ and support forums, I learnt that iScrobbler would pick up your iPod plays as well.  So I downloaded and installed that, but all it seemed to do was scrobble (as they term sending details of what you play to a server) everything twice (presumably once by Last.fm’s scrobbler, and once by iScrobbler), which was crappy, so I promptly uninstalled it.

More trawling, and I found myself back at Last.fm, reading up on iSproggler, which sounded a bit more promising (plus, I reasoned, if it was touted directly from the Last.fm page, it had to be compatible).  So I downloaded and installed that, and gave it a go.  After much trial and error, I worked out that if I disabled Last.fm’s scrobbler (to avoid a double-word score), and made sure I sync’d my Recently Played list between iTunes and my iPod, it worked!  Hurrah! (I’m slightly miffed that it won’t import my entire history from iTunes, but I guess that’s a minor quibble.)

So now, through the miracle of Technology, you can see exactly what I’ve been playing recently.  For what that’s worth.  Given that most of the time I have my iPod on shuffle (of currently 8,999 songs) you’re still only really seeing Apple’s choice and not mine – and I don’t think that is entirely random.  Still, it’s kinda fun.  And a special thanks to Neil for making me as much of a geek as he is!