David Emery Online

Scrobble again

8 September 2008

Back in February I talked about MobileScrobbler, the rather brilliant iPhone app that allowed you to scrobble to Last.fm directly from your iPhone.

Since February however a lot of things have happened in the iPhone ecosystem; most importantly the release of the 3G iPhone with the simultaneous release of iPhone OS version 2.0. With v2.0 we got the official App Store, which you would think was the natural home for the MobileScrobbler app but alas, no – MobileScrobbler has to run (obviously, if you think about it) as a background app to pay attention to what songs you are playing, and that’s not allowed with official apps. Also, I don’t think the forthcoming v2.1 update which includes push notifications for apps will help either (that’ll work great for things like IM apps, but not for things that need to monitor other apps on your phone).

To rub salt into the wound, MobileScrobbler has actually been turned into an official Last.fm app on the app store – removing the scrobbling and focusing on Last.fm radio playback (which I have no interest in), which means that all development on MobileScrobbler has stopped. And development is needed – unofficial apps made for iPhone OS v1 need remaking for v2.

Luckily enough (for all two of you that are still reading by this point) someone has taken the scrobbling code from MobileScrobbler and farmed it off into it’s own app called – and this must have taken some time to think of – ‘Scrobble’. You can get more info about it in the Last.fm iPhone group.

To get unofficial apps onto your v2 iPhone you have to go through a process called ‘Jailbreaking’, which is all a little bit hackish but relatively straightforward. First, you need to download an app called QuickPwn from here and then go through the install steps – it’s easy enough to do, although you do have to hold down various combinations of buttons on your phone for specific amounts of time at one point, which was all a little 80’s sci-fi…

Once you’ve gone through that process you’ll find 2 new apps on your phone – Cydia and Installer. Anyone that has previously jailbroken their phone will instantly gravitate to the Installer app (as that’s what was used on v1) but don’t bother – there’s nothing of note in there to install. Cydia is where the apps are, although their aren’t nearly as many as their used to be thanks to the app store. You can find the Scrobble app under ‘Multimedia’ in Cydia – install it, enter in your Last.fm username/password (hmmm – they could do with supporting OAuth) and you should be scrobbling away!