Ever since I got my iPod I’ve wanted to find a way to list my ‘recently played’ tracks on this Blogsite.\u00c2\u00a0 There are a few WordPress plugins and widgets that claim to do this, but they all seemed overly-complicated, requiring additional e-mail accounts, modified server permissions, and god knows what else.\u00c2\u00a0 So what with having a life to live and all, I never found the time to dig into them and get any of them working properly.<\/p>\n
Then last week a buddy<\/a> responded to a post<\/a> of mine in the Music category, mentioning Last.fm<\/strong> which he said tracked people’s listening habits.\u00c2\u00a0 I checked it out and saw that it built personal listening charts that you could put on your Weblog<\/span>, so I signed up, and downloaded the software<\/a>, to see what it would do.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure enough, with almost no effort on my part (always a key factor!) it tracked whatever I listened to through iTunes, and built me a nice Ten Most Recently Played table (albeit with what seems like an hour’s delay) that I could then include in my ‘blog sidebar (look, there it is down on the bottom right of this page!). Very<\/em> nice!<\/p>\n But then I noticed that it wasn’t tracking what I played on my iPod – only what I played via iTunes.\u00c2\u00a0 Given that I do most of my listening on my iPod (thanks to a nice relaxed regime at work that allows me to sit there wired for sound all day) this struck me as a major shortfall.\u00c2\u00a0 After a couple of hours of trawling through the Last.fm FAQ and support forums, I learnt that iScrobbler<\/strong> would pick up your iPod plays as well.\u00c2\u00a0 So I downloaded and installed that, but all it seemed to do was scrobble (as they term sending details of what you play to a server) everything twice (presumably once by Last.fm’s scrobbler, and once by iScrobbler), which was crappy, so I promptly uninstalled it.<\/p>\n More trawling, and I found myself back at Last.fm, reading up on iSproggler<\/strong>, which sounded a bit more promising (plus, I reasoned, if it was touted directly from the Last.fm page, it had<\/span> to be compatible).\u00c2\u00a0 So\u00c2\u00a0I downloaded<\/a> and installed that, and gave it a go.\u00c2\u00a0 After much trial and error, I worked out that if I disabled Last.fm’s scrobbler (to avoid\u00c2\u00a0a\u00c2\u00a0double-word score), and made sure I sync’d my Recently Played list between iTunes and my iPod, it worked!\u00c2\u00a0 Hurrah! (I’m slightly miffed that it won’t import my entire history from iTunes, but I guess that’s a minor quibble.)<\/p>\n So now, through the miracle of Technology, you can see exactly what I’ve been playing recently.\u00c2\u00a0 For what that’s<\/em> worth.\u00c2\u00a0 Given that most of the time\u00c2\u00a0I have my iPod on shuffle (of currently 8,999 songs) you’re still only really seeing Apple’s choice and not mine – and I don’t think that<\/em> is entirely random<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Still, it’s kinda fun.\u00c2\u00a0 And a special thanks to Neil for making me as much of a geek as he is!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ever since I got my iPod I’ve wanted to find a way to list my ‘recently played’ tracks on this Blogsite.\u00c2\u00a0 There are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,2],"tags":[30,64,42,63],"class_list":["post-61","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-music","tag-ipod","tag-last-fm","tag-music-2","tag-websites"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1748,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions\/1748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}