Connecting the Rhapsody version 4 client to the Last.fm social network may of got just a little bit easier. Today I released a Rhapsody plug-in named ScrobRhapsody as beta software. ScrobRhapsody is a plug-in that works in the background while the Rhapsody player is running. ScrobRhapsody implements the ScrobSub library provided by the folks at Audioscrobbler. The ScrobSub library is the official Last.fm development library for extending the Last.fm service to unsupported music players.
The Last.fm service allows you to easily track your music play history and provides you with all manner of charts, webservices and other tools based on the music you listen to. The stock Last.fm client software monitors Winamp, Windows Media Player and itunes right out of the box. The Last.fm client software is open source and available on a subversion server supported by Last.fm.
I have been a fan of "Now Playing Sigs" so I am really interested in getting the track, title and artist meta-data out of the player and sent while the currently playing song is still playing. Rhapsody has many RSS feeds and web services available. There is quite a lag between the webservices getting updated and from the time the song is actually played. I found the lag just didn't fit in with what I wanted to do and went searching for other options. The ScrobRhapsody plug-in does not use the RSS feeds.
ScrobRhapsody monitors a select few internal functions in Windows to gather the meta-data. The upside is this is a very fast way to get the data. The downside is the code involved may not work on future Rhapsody player clients. This plug-in is dependent on a specific version of the player. ScrobRhapsody will probably need to be updated upon the next release of the Rhapsody client. With that in mind I have made a windows installer that verifies the version of Rhapsody before installing the ScrobRhapsody plug-in. The installer also checks that the Last.fm client software is also installed.
I really like the ScrobSub library. ScrobSub's code easily fit into the form of a single dynamic link library (dll). All I had to do was focus on the code needed to access the meta-data. The result was the ScrobRhapsody plug-in is all contained within a single windows dll file.
Since this is a beta release I am looking foward to any feedback you can provide. ScrobRhapsody has been developed on my Vista Home edition and all the testing that I have done has been using Vista. If you are using XP please let me know if it works...
I started a Last.fm group called Scrobrealplayer. Please leave feedback on the ScrobRealplayer forum. My username at Last.fm is stratagen14. I have some additional posts about my plug-ins there.
I also have a Realplayer plugin for Last.fm called Scrobrealplayer available.