Mash together your Last.fm and iTunes

Do you use iTunes to listen to your music? If so, do you also scrobble your music to Last.fm? You should. Doing so provides many benefits - some of which don't become obvious until you've been doing it for a few months. I have had the little Last.fm daemon running in my task bar for the past 6 months or so innocuously keeping track of what I've been listening to and using it to build up "recommendations" for me on the Last.fm site. I have to say, after that much time, the site knows me pretty well. As I would expect, hitting the site and letting it play "my recommendations" tends to weigh heavily in the southern/classic rock and blues direction but it also spices itself up with some Motown and some Stax Soul (due in large part to a fixation (and a downloaded box set) I had with each a few weeks back). Toss in a little metal, a little rap, some prog rock and even some ecclectic Cuban music and you get a pretty well rounded playlist. Good stuff.

After experiencing this, it became pretty obvious to me that the Last.fm can really benefit from tracking my iTunes habits - but I wondered, could it work in the opposite? Could iTunes benefit from my usage of Last.fm? Turns out it can!

If you're familiar with the way I access my home music here at work, you know that I do it through a combination of iTunes built in LAN sharing and a little piece of software called Hamachi (now owned by LogMeIn). This is unbelievably convenient, but what I miss out on are two key features of iTunes that I would love to take advantage of - play count tracking and song rating. Neither is possible when using a remote library. Well, thanks to an innovative PERL scripter (and Last.fm/iTunes fan) the first of the two problems is all but solved!

It works like this - you install a free PERL scripting interface and run the guy's script on the computer where your iTunes library lives. It goes out, connects to your Last.fm account which has been keeping track of what you play, and how often, and if the playcount on Last.fm for a song is greater than what your local iTunes has in its database, it updates it! Viola! All automatic like!

An obvious question is "why the hell do you care?" and to that I answer "Smart Playlists". What's that? You don't use Smart Playlists? Well, you should. I'll just leave it at that.

Now... if only I could find a good way to rate my songs remotely I'd be in heaven and my playlists would get that much better!


Download the PERL script here.

Tutorial for the install here.