First, for those who are unfamiliar with Last.fm, allow me to sing it's praises and enlighten you. Last.fm is a website that tracks your music-listening habits and forms charts of all that statistics. Sounds exhilarating, right? Sarcasm aside, Last.fm is one of the most interesting and interactive websites I've ever joined. But then, I like stuff like music charts and linking artists and genre tags. "Scrobble" is a term coined by the site to refer to a track play that has been captured by it's software and added to your profile. Users are then rated against eachother, you can upload and vote on artist pictures, build a library, play recommended music of genre tag radio stations, and much more.
I have a low attention span when it comes to music so I find myself clicking "next" well
before a song is finished. One trick I learned early on is how to scrobble more efficiently while still capturing all my playcounts. The trick is built-in to the Last.fm audio scrobbler and is NOT a loophole. If you're looking to go from a playcount of 20 to 20,000 in 20 minutes, you're out of luck."So shut up and tell me already!" Okay, okay...
*Open your Last.fm audio scrobbler software and enter the Preferences panel.
*Click on the tab for "Scrobbling"
*Locate the slider that says "Scrobble at:" and adjust it until it says "50 percent of track length"
*Press "Apply" and "Ok"
What we just did should be self-explanatory, but let me spell it out anyway. With this new setting, your track will be scrobbled into Last.fm's system and added to your charts after only half of the song has played, as opposed to the full-length or 80%, etc.. This is useful for people like me who get the flavor of a song and then want to move on without waiting until the bitter end. But here are some tips to get the maximum benefit from this new setting:
For rapidly increasing playcounts of a song or artist:
*in iTunes or your preferred music player, set up a new playlist
*Add songs from the artist you want to focus on, or add one song about 3 or 4 times.
*Turn on the "Repeat" function so the playlist is continuous.
*Begin playing a track in this playlist and then watch the scrobbling bar on your Last.fm software. The bar will be full half-way through the song. This means it is scrobbled. The countdown clock tells you how much longer until it's scrobbled.
*At that point, in your music player, click the far end of the scrolling playbar to immediately advance the song to the end. This allows iTunes/your music player to capture the play (iTunes also tracks the number of plays for individual tracks.)
*Depending on your purpose, a new song by the same artist or the same track will immediately begin. Watch the Last.fm status bar, or the music player scroller (check with the count-down clock to make sure it's scrobbled) then at the 50% mark, repeat the last step. You are now counting two scrobbles in the same time frame as listening to one full track.
*If you don't want to hear the beginning of the same song every time, click the end of the track, then as the next track begins, click in the center and play from there. If you time it just right, and have an accurate mousing-hand, you can count two scrobbles for one play without missing a beat! This takes some practice and a good knowledge of your particular song.
Was that too confusing? Try it for about 10 minutes then look at your Recently Played chart on your Last.fm profile. You'll have twice as many songs in half the time!
Good luck and happy scrobbling!
