Changes to Last.fm radio scrobbling will allow us to improve our recommendations.Corrections information will be returned where relevant so users can be prompted to fix any incorrect metadata they may have.Yes, we will finally be able to answer the burning question – “Do Amarok users have better taste than XBox Live users?” We hope that our scrobbling partners and their users will be able to do cool things with this data. Migrating to the web services will improve our ability to track the use of scrobble applications, so we can do groovy things like charts of the most popular scrobblers, and analyses of musical tastes across different scrobblers.We also hope that this will lead to applications which currently just scrobble to use the rest of our API and vice-versa, with the end result being cooler apps with more features for everyone. This should simplify things for developers by having one unified authentication, request and response mechanism. The scrobbling API will become a fully-fledged member of the Last.fm Web Services under a new “Scrobble” package joining its friends Track.love and Track.ban instead of being all sad and lonely on the sidelines.Here’s a summary of just some of the highlights planned for the new API: We’ll be monitoring the post and taking feedback onboard. All the technical details can be read on our forum here and we’d like to keep detailed discussion there. Please bear in mind that this is not complete or final we’re releasing it as a “request for comment” from the developer and user community. We are finally able to unveil our first draft of what the new API might look like. My post back in January 2009 generated pages of suggestions, plenty of e-mail conversations with developers and led to many hours of internal discussions and arguments involving nearly everyone in the company in some way. Given the heavy use of the current scrobbling API, releasing a new version of it is not something we take lightly – which is why it’s taken more than a year to get to where we are today. A fair share of all existing scrobblers is listed on – browse around if you’re curious! Preparing a new version of the scrobbling API Scrobbles-per-second monitor in the Last.fm operations room, powered by CactiView.Īll told we have more than 600 scrobblers created by people other than us, covering popular online services like Spotify and The Hype Machine, hardware devices like the Onkyo TX-NR807 and the Logitech Squeezebox, as well as online storage services like Bitspace, extensions for browsers like Chrome (via Chrome Scrobbler), Opera (via Seesu) and Firefox (via FoxyTunes), and finally, for the real geeks, plugins for Gnome’s totem player and a promising-looking fork of Amarok called Clementine, to name just a few. Our scrobbling servers get a lot of traffic – at certain times of the day we have nearly 800 people telling us what they are listening to every second, and we are nearing our 40 billionth scrobble! There are also many different ways to scrobble the music you’re hearing, some developed by us (such as our official Last.fm, Android, and iPhone apps) as well as applications developed by third parties and music-loving geeks from all over the world. We also wanted to make the API more extensible so that we could define certain information which must always be submitted (like track and artist name) while allowing us to provide extra functionality in future via optional fields that wouldn’t break existing scrobblers. The current API does a decent enough job, but we’ve had many developers complain about it being inconsistent with the other ways of accessing Last.fm data (via our web services) and its rather shoddy feedback on errors. They’re the building blocks of your music profile, and put together, they power basically everything that Last.fm knows about music. Scrobbles are incredibly important to us. It feels like just the other week that I posted this on the Last.fm developer forum to get feedback and ideas on a new version of our scrobbling API that we were mulling over.įor those less technically-inclined, the scrobbling API defines how data gets transmitted to Last.fm every time you listen to a song.

Does lastfm scrobbler bandcamp