Over the last couple of weeks, I have been playing around with AudioScrobbler. I like the idea of being able to correlate my music habits with other people in order to generate my shopping list.

At work, my music player is going to be tied to Windows, either WMP or Winamp, most likely. The plugins for those are written by the same person, and look exactly the same, as far as I can tell. Except I can't seem to get the Winamp version to connect...

At home, my music is run through mpd. It's a client/server player, so I can use whatever interface I want. And a quick search popped up a python based mpd client that would shuffle data to the AudioScrobbler server. However, it didn't check for song lengths and it didn't wait the appropriate time before submitting. Admittedly, watching for a couple minutes for seeks is hard with mpd. I'm eagerly awaiting the listener protocol to handle this.

As a result of all my displeasure with mpdscrobbler, I decided to put something of my own together. It's not a complex protocol to follow. In fact, I decided to put together a library to handle the AudioScrobbler work and a client that hooked mpd and libscrobbler together.

As of right now, it works. I just checked out my user page, and songs are being updated. However, I can guarantee there are bugs in there. In fact, there will probably be minor design changes before the end of the week. I'm already planning to change the cache file format.

When things evolve into a more stable state, I'll release both the client and library for public consumption. I'm hoping it won't be too long before that happens.