What to do if your music application stops scrobbling

August 5th, 2009 • 20:08

What to do if your music application stops scrobbling

Some time ago I had a problem with scrobbling. It didn’t work at all. There was no such application where scrobbling worked fine but Music On Console with lastfmsubmitd. But listening to music in console is not what I wanted to do. I tried applications written in Python also as in Java. After some time I figured out what’s going on and where’s the problem. There’s my solution.

Last.fm is a great service and a lot of people use it. It can be possible that you have scrobbled and you don’t know that. So, what the hell scrobbling means?

Scrobbling a song means that when you listen to it, the name of the song is sent to Last.fm and added to your music profile.
Once you’ve signed up and downloaded Last.fm, you can scrobble songs you listen to on your computer or iPod automatically. Start scrobbling yourself, and see what artists you really listen to the most. Songs you listen to will also appear on your Last.fm profile page for others to see.
Millions of songs are scrobbled every day. This data helps Last.fm to organise and recommend music to people; we use it to create personalised radio stations, and a lot more besides.

Just check this out and know more. You do know now how last.fm works, so I have an information for you – it is possible that scrobbling stops in your Debian, maybe also in other distros, but nobody cares about non-Debian GNU/Linux distros :) Carry on. If you realized that you have problems with scrobbling – all plug-ins and options are set up, but last.fm doesn’t see your songs – just try to run application in console. I took some screenshots of terminal running two music applications: aTunes and Banshee. I usually use Exaile and I had taken screenshots of Exaile, too, but I lost them.

Have you got similar view? aTunes is written in Java and it has got some last.fm special functions built-in. I mean favorites, for example. If your application has got such option – add to favorites in last.fm – you can check this. I figured out where was problem, because this option worked. Where is the problem? Timezone is configured not as good as it should be.

You have to configure timezone files and it’s good to run ntpd service. The ntpd program is an operating system daemon that synchronizes the system clock with remote NTP time servers or local reference clocks, so it let you always to be on-time, automatically. I don’t want to repeat good sources, so there are three links which are useful for you now: