Hi, I would like to know a bit more about how the official last.fm app for iOS scrobbles song from Apple Music.
The official documentation states that a track should be scrobbled if:
The track must be longer than 30 seconds.
And the track has been played for at least half its duration, or for 4 minutes (whichever occurs earlier.)
However, these conditions are not taken into account when scrobbling from Apple Music via the official last.fm app for iOS.
I did several tests (with songs downloaded to my library) and the 50% of track played doesn't seem to work.
Does anyone know what are the conditions then in this case?
PS: It would be great if these settings were adjustable like they are in the Mac version of the app.
The official Last.fm iOS app scans your Music library for new scrobbles which you can then submit to your Last.fm account. It's possible that the Music library only counts fully played tracks as new and ignores skipped tracks, not sure.
Maybe other iOS scrobblers/apps like Marvis Pro would update the play count of a skipped track, but you would have to ask their developers, e.g. in the subreddit r/MarvisApp.
By the way, scrobbling the Apple Music web player with the Web Scrobbler browser extension should also scrobble skipped tracks after 50%.
Hi, thanks for the reply. I was hoping someone would have some concrete information.
Though asking the devs of other scrobblers is a neat idea, I haven鈥檛 thought of that. I might check that out.
I mean it is clear that the 50% rule doesn鈥檛 apply in this case but it would be nice to know the actual conditions/numbers.
It鈥檚 strange that scrobbling is so inconsistent throughout all apps. I would expect one single setting to make things easier.
Anyway, thank you for your time and the insight.
Essentially it just looks up your itunes/apple music library, and checks to see if the playcounts (counted by apple) have increased since the last time you scanned it. This is why you have to add music to your Apple Music library first for it to scrobble.
There's no way for us to enforce the 50% rule (or scrobble in realitime), due to the limitations of iOS, without building a bespoke apple music player (which I believe is what Marvis Pro does).
It鈥檚 strange that scrobbling is so inconsistent throughout all apps. I would expect one single setting to make things easier.
This would be true if other developers implemented our scrobbling API into their own music apps. However, in many cases, we have to support these apps ourselves, and our capacity to do so is restricted by how flexible and permissive their platforms and APIs are. It often results in somewhat kludgy workarounds.
For example on Android devices we can get the artist, album, and track information from the notification tray and this works for most music apps; whereas iOS is considerably more restricted, leading to less than ideal workarounds that require us to scan your apple music library for changes.
Keep in mind that scrobbling was conceived during the golden era of Winamp plugins, that allowed third party developers to extend the functionality of popular media players (anyone remember apps for Spotify?). These days the trend has moved in the opposite direction, with platforms becoming closed ecosystems, and that makes scrobbling more challenging to support.
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Thank you for the detailed explanation. I had no idea iOS and macOS apps can be so different in this regard.
Oh well, eventually I ended up buying Marvis - the automatic scrobbling (with the possibility to set the 50%/4 minutes rule) and sending the scrobbles to last.fm site is priceless.
Thanks for all the help!
