I listen to a lot of music and thought some capabilities of the new Apple service sounded interesting. However, I soon discovered that streamed songs did not scrobble. This is bad.
Since 2006 I have been using a music service called Last.Fm. What I find interesting about LastFM is scrobbling. I have no idea where this term comes from. Scrobbling means that whenever I listen to a song on a device I own LastFM keeps track. The summary data are interesting. Since 2006, I have listened to 230,965 songs. The song I have played most frequently is Bullet and a Target by Citizen Cope – 147 times. My favorite artist has been Miles Davis – 3748 plays. I find the data on my tastes and how my interests change over time fascinating. Big data offers some other interesting social features. I am able to compare my interests to those of other LastFM users and the service tells me how compatible our interests seem to be. The idea is that I can follow what others with similar interests listen to and find new songs and artists to try out.
I probably spent two hours last night trying to figure out if there was anything that could be done. Many searches turned up complaints, but no solutions. Finally, someone recommended BowTie. I remembered this product and knew that the developer had stopped working on it, but I found a source that still had it available (FileHorse). I would not normally download files from an unknown source, but I looked for complaints first and then gave it a true. Sure enough I can scrobble from the new Apple streaming service.
This post will likely make little sense to many. But, if you are a scrobbler and cannot give it up, BowTie will keep you going until something else emerges.