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.
