I am a big fan of the music social networking site Last.fm (find my profile here), but one thing that I was never able to get working satisfactorily was ’scrobbling’ of my iPod plays.

The first path I tried was taking my (ancient) 3rd Gen. 10GB iPod, and installing the open-source Rockbox firmware. This was a disaster. Rockbox was not originally designed for the iPod, but was ported over – while the programmers that work on it have done an amazing job – and bear in mind that the iPod I was trying this on was very old, and very battered – it wasn’t working well for me. It frequently crashed, forcing me to do a hard reset. When it did eventually play it would hang every 10 seconds, or so, while playing. I found the solution to this to be not having the song info open while listening, but to simply have the display set to the main menu – playback was then flawless (mostly…). The reason for this experiment was that the Rockbox firmware has a built-in option to create a ‘.scrobbler.log’ file which contains all the information of what you played, for how long, when etc. This is then uploaded to Last.fm either by a php script written by Paul Stead (found here), or by a .NET application called LogScrobbler (found here). The scrobbling side of things worked perfectly, and for the adventurous who want to try it, and who may have more success than I did, I wholly recommend it. If you have a DAP that is fully supported by Rockbox then this could be the way for you to scrobble your plays.

Part 2 – The more successful scrobbling attempts to follow later