How Last.fm made me hack my iPod Touch

I recently heard Last.fm was pretty cool, so I decided to try it out for myself. For those who don't know, Last.fm is a community of people who share their music playlists and recommendations with each other by installing a program that tracks it all for you. This is called 'scrobbling'. Confused yet?

Anyway, I signed up, installed the application on my iMac and laptops, and started listening. After verifying that my recently played tracks in iTunes were getting uploaded to the site, I next wanted to figure out how to send songs played on my iPod back to Last.fm as well. Simple, right?

Wrong. I dug through the help docs only to find that when you sync your iPod to iTunes, Last.fm will only transfer your recently played tracks if you use the 'Automatic Sync' setting in iTunes. Not cool. Manual Sync is the way to go if you use multiple computers or if you have more music on your computer than your iPod will hold. Both of these are me, so on to Plan B.

Since I can't tell my scrobbler what I've been listening to on my iPod, I searched around and found a cool iPod Touch application called Mobile Scrobbler. Mobile Scrobbler tracks the songs you listen to just like the desktop scrobbler, but instead of relying on syncing with iTunes, it uses the WiFi connection on your iPod Touch to send your tracks directly back to Last.fm. Brilliant.

One problem. This application requires a jailbroken ipod (that's 'hacked' for non-nerds). Apparently the newest version of the iPhone/iPod Touch hack is from Ziphone, so I downloaded and installed it. After two tries, it worked! The bad part was I had to do a restore midway through the first attempt and lost all my songs. The good part was MobileScrobbler is a recommended application in the Ziphone package, and I didn't have to push more than two buttons to get it downloaded and set up.

So, MobileScrobbler has been working great for the past couple days. Just finished uploading music back to the iTouch, and it's scrobbling and transferring everything to my profile seamlessly. If I manage this correctly, people will think I listen to really cool music. You can find me at http://www.last.fm/user/mattdougherty/.