Scrobble an internet radio station?

justanotherider disse:
[...] ID3 informations associated to streams (when they are present) are not considerate consistent enough to base a whole scrobbling feature on it.[...]

DI.FM have a VERY consistent ID3 tags on their streamings, put a filter on that and enable the radio after some feedbacks about the ID3 consistency.

Is not that hard.

It's a bit wierd that this doesn't work by default. I stream my mp3s over http when @ work too. Same files, no scrobbling :(

Another approach would be some kind of plug-in that logs the id's you get from the net-station, checks it for scrobbling-compatibility and wraps the correct-info into a scrobblable-file i.e a pseudo-mp3 just for id-tag-transfer.
That way the last.fm-soft thinks you were listening to a recording of the given radio show when in reality you were streaming it...

ive been listening to i-radio for about a week, now i notice nothing is scrobbled... soo sad. Well i guess i have to live with no scrobbling

We need a solution!!!!!!!

I don't think there's any way of fingerprinting that could ignore spoken words. I mean, how would the computer tell which frequencies are part of the original recording and which are voice-over? It already ignores tags entirely.

Is it possible to have a whitelist of online stations that are considered safe to scrobble? I listen to http://somafm.com/ a lot and they seem to have very accurate tags.

If the developers have issues about the quality of tags, then maybe only allow certain white listed radio stations?

Thanks

I guess you are not the only one, after all. But I'd like to give you something to think about:

First of all, you always would be able to choose whether your internet radio is scrobbled or not, or should be able to - at least that's what I have in mind, and most others probably too. Just as when listening to your own music: For example, when using Winamp with the plugin, you can always enable and disable scrobbling in the "Tools" menu of the Last.fm program.

So, in the case that you are listening to radio just for some uninteresting background noise, or to catch up with the lastest charts, or you're playing some kind of music to please your mother-in-law, whatever: And you don't want this to influence your Last.fm profile, then scrobbling is disabled. But in the case you're listening to your favourite station and really enjoy all that you hear, you probably would like to get this registered by Last.fm.

Not at least because Last.fm can and will use this information to recommend new artists to you! That's the essential function of Last.fm, isn't it?

And this leads to another thought: When you are listening to music through Last.fm, either on the website or with the stand-alone program, it is scrobbled - though you don't own or specifically chose these tracks. Last.fm is calling this "Radio station" too...

So I think, if Last.fm streams and stations are scrobbled, it wouldn't be wrong to have the possibility to scrobble "conventional" internet radio stations likewise.

What's more:

Internet radio, at least the kind of internet radio that I know and appreciate, has nothing to do at all with commercial, MI-controlled and money-making mass broadcasting radio, that pollutes the FM airwaves everywhere. The most interesting stations are put online by music-loving enthusiasts, who are often very elaborate in discovering new artists, that maybe even Last.fm doesn't know about yet. Soma.fm with its 14 stations is probably one of the shiniest examples, but most stations (that have survived SoundExchange and all the hindrances through recent U.S. legislation) are much smaller, maybe just an expensive hobby, but they are 100% individual.

I recently discovered SomaFM and I'm as disappointed as everyone else here that those tracks aren't scrobbled. My profile would have huge benefits from scrobbling those tracks, I would get better recommendations for music I actually like, which would then improve my last.fm recommendation radio and also my personal radio station. Then I could also love those tracks and have them in my loved tracks radio the next time I'm feeling like getting a subscription.

Same thing over here.
It acutally DOES show that I am listening to a track, but since that very track never ends, instead of 10 sequential tracks I only scrobbe one.

The sh!t
Last.fm gets worse and worse..oh well

Btw. What has the last.fm team said about this whole internet radio scrobbling ?

When they decide to do it and while they're at it, they could consider to scrobble the medium: local file or a radio stations name, and then put them in a list of order that what medium each listener have listened and for how long in total or so...

fuloating said:
Btw. What has the last.fm team said about this whole internet radio scrobbling?

Even though I'm not a staff member I think I can comment on this question. I've recently compared the new version 1.2.1 of the audioscrobbler protocol to an older one and found that the new one does not explicitly exclude scrobbling a stream anymore.

Compare it yourself:

The old protocol version (1.1) - in the section "Submitting songs" it says specifically that "if a user is playing a stream instead of a regular file, do not submit that stream/song"
The new protocol version (1.2.1) does not say anything at all about forbidding to scrobble streams (cmp. the corresponding section "The submission"), so we can assume it's allowed.

Furthermore, in section 3.2 (Submission Stage) the protocol defines a value "R" for the key "o" (this key is defined as "The source of the track") - and the protocol says that this value "R" is to be used for "Non-personalised broadcast (e.g. Shoutcast, BBC Radio 1)". The fact that they define an own value for Shoutcast (which represents almost all internet radio stations) here proves that they consider internet radio a valid, "scrobbleable" source.

In short, all we'll have to wait for is for the plugin authors to implement this. If I'm not mistaken, the latest beta version of the free linux player Amarok does in fact support this (I think I read this somewhere in a group forum here on last.fm). So actually this whole discussion about whether or not they should support scrobbling streams is not needed anymore for they've seemingly already decided.

But then again - maybe - my understanding of the new protocol version just might be wrong. I read it very thoroughly, though, and I'd say none of the rules contradicts scrobbling streams. I'd love to have any staff member comment on this.