I re-discovered Winamp a few months ago, after a long separation (thanks, Brent!)…I’ve tried a lot of music players/library managers on Windows, and Winamp is my present choice. (Songbird is coming along, but it’s not QUITE where I want it yet). It slices, it dices, it organizes, it plays. Beautiful.
I realized today I’m missing a piece of the puzzle, though; last.fm audioscrobbling. Just about every other music player/device I use — my Chumby, my Nokia 770, Banshee on my Linux box, etc. — allows me to post my music played to last.fm, either directly or via a proxy. I haven’t been doing that with Winamp though…a hole in my stats. *grumble* Tonight I noticed, and decided to fix it. I figured…hugely popular and long-lived app…how hard can it be
? Eh…therein lies the rub. So I thought it’d be a good idea to drop some notes; for my future re-installs, and for anyone else it might help.
The issue is partially the long-livedness (is that a word?) of Winamp (and associated API drift), and partially the fact that the last.fm folks don’t appear to be all that jazzed up over Winamp anymore, so it doesn’t get a huge amount of plugin love/debugging. Regardless…the 5.5 upgrade to Winamp apparently whacked the existing audioscrobbler. After this was noticed by the community, who then proceeded to track down and identify the problem, a re-release of the plugin was announced. I got that, but I still had a problem with it; no config screen would pop up.
After more googling, I finally found a solution that worked for me (on WinXP SP2; ymmv). Two parts:
- Install the 2.0.47 plugin linked off of this forum thread
- Go to this page, and follow these directions (updating a dll)
- (optional) Then config plugin with last.fm login info, if needed
Works like a CHAMP. I’m now updating last.fm via just about every connected music source I use. Just need to track down/wire up a method to do proper MTP-type mobile player info, and I’m 100%! Thanks to everyone on those threads and web pages for doing the gruntwork.
