Scrobbling Apple Music to Last.fm from Windows with AirScrobble and Cider
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Scrobbling Apple Music to Last.fm from Windows with AirScrobble and Cider
Yesterday on MacStories, I wrote about Apple’s native Apple Music client for Windows, which debuted on the Microsoft Store alongside Apple TV and Apple Devices. In the story, I mentioned in a footnote (that’s always the best place for these things) how the official Last.fm desktop scrobbler doesn’t recognize songs playing in the Apple Music app, and I wasn’t the only one to notice this. As someone who’s still scrobbling after 20 years of Last.fm, I wanted to figure out a way to reliably and easily scrobble tracks to my account while listening to Apple Music on Windows. For today’s issue of MacStories Weekly, I’m going to cover two different ways you can do this.
The first solution I’ve thought about is by keeping an iPhone next to your PC and running AirScrobble on it. Created by indie developer Tomás Martins, AirScrobble is an ingenious utility I’ve wanted to cover for a while (it came out last summer): it uses the ShazamKit framework for iOS to automatically and continuously detect what’s playing around you. Then, by connecting to your Last.fm account, the app can scrobble the tracks it matched. This way, if you’re listening to Apple Music via your computer’s speakers, you can keep AirScrobble running on your iPhone (and perhaps place the phone on a desk charger like my beloved Anker cube) and rest assured everything will be scrobbled to your Last.fm account.