Open Music Scrobbling: Libre.fm Updates

In July 2005 I sent an email to my friend Erin with this in the body.

http://www.audioscrobbler.com/user/artlung/

http://www.audioscrobbler.com/

i dont quite understand it yet

Those links are now at last.fm. You can “friend” me on that site. Here’s my profile: artlung.

I love nerding out about music!

I have enjoyed tracking my listening in the subsequent decades. I can see my history and trends. When I was a teenager, even more decades ago, I kept a spreadsheet of all my music. I included vinyl, cassette tapes. Including those I had recorded from the radio. I took to scrobbling immediately. I worked at Slacker Radio in the 2010s. I worked on the Web Scrobbler connector for Slacker music products. The source code is open. There are now browser add-ons for the major browsers, not just Chrome. And also, WS supports Libre.fm.

What’s Libre.fm?

I got to chat with Mattl at XOXO this year. I enjoy meeting people conversant with the web history I am. Matt has been working on libre.fm since 2009. When we chatted in Portland he was talking about reviving that software. Modernization. Improvements. He has active users scrobbling daily. Continuously even. It’s no small thing to revisit projects that “work.” He’s embraced indieweb-related technologies like rel=me and has a roadmap for improvements and this impresses me a great deal. It ain’t easy to work on running software.

He has detailed all of this in his recent blog post Bunch of updates to Libre.fm this week (2024/10/06). If tracking your music is of interest to you, and given the popularity of year-end lists every year, I think it’s more common than not, check it out.

Get a sense of the issues he’s tackling at the GitHub issues page for Libre.fm.

And for even more background, Libre.fm is notable enough to have a Wikipedia page.