Scrobbling Vinyl to Last.fm

Since AudioScrobbler first arrived on the scene back in the early naughties I’ve been ‘scrobbling’ my listening behaviour to my AudioScrobbler profile for the interests of fellow music aficionados, friends, prospective employers and the NSA. While this was as simple as installing a plugin or ticking a box in my mp3/ogg/whatever player of choice I’m also a keen fan of vinyl records. As this is an analogue medium they aren’t easy to scrobble, but not impossible.

AudioScrobbler was purchased and integrated into Last.fm in 2002 and despite the many changes that have been made to it’s operation and layout, it’s core use remains the same.

In recent years there have been projects like scrobbyl that uses the EchoNest  API to read the input from your turntable via your PC hardware to try to identify the song, these unfortunately require a lot of maintenance, particularly if the Audioscrobbler API changes in any way and they often get sadly abandoned.

There are more manual operations like the VinylScrobbler page that lets you pick a release from the likes of Discogs and scrobbles it, track by track, to AudioScrobbler based on the track times. Sadly these also tend to be coding projects that get abandoned when the single person working on them moves onto other things.

For a time I was using the Vinyl Scrobbler (not related to the site above) that let me pick a release from discogs but it seems to be unable to connect anymore and hasn’t had an update in a few years now.

Currently I’m using CogScrobbler which is a desktop app that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux that follows the same pattern. It’s quite basic, but it does let you save releases to a ‘Collection’ list so you don’t have to keep searching Discogs for your vinyl.

In currently on the lookout for any other methods, especially the automated ones that use identification. Leave suggestions in the comments.

2 thoughts on “Scrobbling Vinyl to Last.fm”

  1. yeah, i’m also on the look out for a good program that does vinyl scrobbling ( preferably automatically on my computer which is what scrobbyl tried to do), and haven’t had any luck. the best alternative that i’ve found is the android app “Vinyl Scrobbler” (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.jollybox.vinylscrobbler&hl=en).

    it scrobbles in a similar way to the web app “VinylScrobbler,” except that the android app uses discogs to allow you to manually search, or scan the barcode. you can tell it whether you already listened to the record (which makes it scrobble immediately), or whether you are currently listening to the record (scrobbling the tracks as the duration guides the track-by-track scrobbling).

    it’s not flawless, but it’s the best there currently is, to my knowledge.

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  2. VinylScrobbler doesn’t work for me, neither does CogScrobbler.

    But Vscrobble works.
    You tag an album with ‘vinyl’ on last.fm and it shows up on your page, ready to be scrobbled. Scrobbling is done with one button for the whole album. You can’t just scrobble single songs and you can’t specify when you listened to it, but I can live with that for the moment. http://vscrobble.com/

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