LastPy - a simple last.fm scrobbler

Anybody that loves music must have heard about a portal called last.fm. There are many social-music portals, but last.fm is a bit different - mainly the music you listen to is not entered via a form 'my favorite genres', you submit your music preferences by actually listening to music (plugins for music players, embedded radio stations etc.).

It's cool, most popular music players support last.fm, however problems may occur while you're listening Internet radio stations via a browser (i.e. using flash plugins). I really loved a radio station called Epic Rock Radio, and I always wondered how to scrobble the songs that I am currently listening.

When I accidentally lost all my music files I was encouraged (besides recovering music from my iPad) to implement a scrobbler that could handle online radio stations.

First I made some research, searched the last.fm discussion groups, developers guides and I found just what I was looking for: the Audioscrobbler Realtime Submission Protocol (v1.2 specification available here). 


It occurred that last.fm has a RESTful API for purpose of scrobbling songs. A simplified session may be presented as follows:

1. HANDSHAKE / AUTHENTICATION
2. "Now Playing"
3. SUBMIT SONG

Where steps 2-3 may be repeated (in any order) as long as the session key (obtained via HANDSHAKE) is up to date.

After I had a working audioscrobbler it was much easier to implement one for the mentioned radio station (data available in XML from live365.com) :-)

You can find my prototype implementation on github: LastPy

P.S. I wrote it a few years ago, it ain't clean and tidy, but it works ;-)