Recently the Last FM community has been gnashing its teeth over the latest itunes update, which moves it to 64-bit and renders it impossible to scrobble to last fm from via its itunes plugin.
What you say? Last FM is a music database website with desktop clients and plug-ins that enables you to consolidate your playcounts from itunes, windows media player, Spotify etc into one place. It’s clearly been struggling recently to sustain itself and the itunes issues shows no signs of being fixed anytime soon though there are unofficial work-arounds in the forums.
I love last fm, wish it well, but can’t help feel it’s time may be drawing to a close. So, should I start to think about somewhere else to scrobble to – their word for recording playcounts. And, crucially, who offers a migration function for the 20,000 odd scrobbles on my last fm profile?
Still Scrobbling away here OK.
Is it a windows problem?
If so I’m sure they’ll find a way around it.
It’s a problem with the windows desktop client. But bearing in mind they are losing money and down to thirty staff, it wouldn’t surprise me to see them shut.
Even if they do fix it I’d still be interested in alternative scrobblers I could export to..particularly any that are open source/community run.
There is a service called libre.fm which positions itself as an open source alternative to last.fm, but I don’t know a great deal about it, and a quick Google wasn’t that helpful for researching pros and cons vs last.fm.
(my last.fm username is badoldworld, btw, and anyone here is welcome to friend me up. There is an old Word Magazine group on there that has a few familiar names in!)
The Last FM business situation explained. Are scrobbles enough to build a business case around?
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/oct/08/last-fm-made-loss
I use Last Fm to keep track of scrobbles but to bev honest only visit the website now and again. Think it needs updating in some way to get more traffic
I wondered why it had stopped working, though not enough to research it. Thanks for clearing that up for me at least.