Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Music streams and audioscrobbler

[Jonathan Matthew <jonathan kaolin hn org>]

On Fri, Dec 30, 2005 at 04:37:27PM -0800, Michael Knepher wrote:
> I recently installed 0.9.2 and decided to sign up at last.fm and try out
> the audioscrobbler plugin. It seems to be a nice service, but it doesn't
> suit my current listening habits particularly well. I have no idea if my
> use case can be accommodated, but here goes:
> 
> I mainly use rhythmbox at work. I've copied some of my music files onto
> my work PC, but I really don't have a lot of space, so I run an mp3
> stream of my music from home and listen to that quite a bit. As a
> result, my last.fm profile pretty much has just a small portion of the
> songs/artists that I listen to. 
> 
> Is it possible to feed the song and artist info that rhythmbox pulls
> from the stream into the audioscrobbler plugin? I know that I wouldn't
> necessarily want every 'net radio station I listen to being fed through
> the plugin, but being able to check a box in the properties for my home
> stream would be handy, and make the whole last.fm thing more useful for
> me.

The problem here is that shoutcast metadata doesn't give you separate
album, artist, and title fields, it's just one (not very long) string.
Streams are not consistent in how they format this string, either.
It'd be difficult to reliably parse the string and get usable data to
submit.  I can't check at the moment (last.fm is down), but I think
there are guidelines about doing this in the audioscrobbler protocol
documentation.  Mostly "don't".

I think it would actually be a better idea to do audioscrobbler
submission on the server side in this case.