I was bitching with a friend today about how I wished that there was a program that would pull your ‘scrobbles’ (aka playcounts) stored on Last.fm and re-import them back into your iTunes library. I wanted this because I went through a few hard drive issues a few months ago and managed to lose my iTunes database (thankfully, all my music was stored on an external hard drive at the time, so I didn’t lose any of that), and with it, about 4 years of playcounts and other assorted metadata.
Thankfully, I was googling as I bitched, and came across this thread on the Last.fm discussion boards. Not one, but two! people had come up with solutions to this problem. As I don’t have Perl installed on my computer, I went with the second option. It worked exactly as advertised, and pulled the ‘last played’ and playcounts stored on Last.fm, and added them to the iTunes database.
I’m not going to lie, I sort of wish it pulled in some sort of ‘date added’ data too, and the scrobbler was acting a bit wonky after that when I tried to scrobble the most recent plays from my ipod, but all in all, I can’t really complain. If I knew how to code, I could probably add the first one (published source code, fuck yeah!), and the scrobbler is always a bit wonky, so the second problem is really To Be Expected.
Go forth, friends, and rescue your playcounts! Alternately, sign up for a Last.fm account, and back that shit up. Or just back up your iTunes database. Whichever. :p
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