A Whole Lotta Nothing Matt Haughey’s Personal Blog

Will MobileScrobbler work in the new iPhone SDK?

Here’s something I’ve been wondering about. Ever since Apple released the roadmap of iPhone development and the SDK details, they mentioned that third-party apps can’t run in the background. After avoiding it for months, I finally did the jailbreak on my iPhone last month because I realized I listened to music/podcasts constantly on the device, and none of that data was reaching my last.fm account. I opened up my iPhone to third-party apps just to get MobileScrobbler running, and it works great.

But it does the magic in the background (even over EDGE, which I optionally allowed). You play songs as normal, and every so often a tiny ping goes out to last.fm, logging the music played. I imagine that won’t be possible with the official SDK but I haven’t seen anyone mention this app specifically.

So mac/iPhone nerds: will I have to keep a jailbroken out-of-date iPhone to keep using MobileScrobbler come June when the new iPhone stuff is released?

Some lucky 3rd party apps will certainly have access to background resources (can you imagine Instant Messaging without it) so my guess is that if Last.FM get’s approved they could do background services in this case, but if not I don’t see any other way. Even if one had to manually allow the ping to the servers the program would require running in the background to collect the data. It’s certainly not an evil application so hopefully Apple would provide some leniency in this instance.

If Apple forbids this I could see a possible workaround where MobileScrobbler piggybacks on top of an authorized application, like iChat or something.

I think Apple would be intensely interested in collecting this data as well, so maybe an upcoming version of iTunes will have last.fm-like capabilities…

There’s an iScrobbler preference that lets you “Enable iPod Submissions”…does that not work for you?

Naw Jason, the iScrobbler app doesn’t access iPhone play history when docked as far as I know. When I complained about that, someone at last.fm told be to jailbreak and use MobileScrobbler, which works exactly as expected.

I could see it being a huge security risk for the iPhone SDK to let you do things like this (pinging websites with data while the iPod is playing) so I have a strong feeling it’s not going to work via official means.

I use iSproggler with my unjailbroken iPhone and it works. After I dock it, I have to click the iScrobbler system tray icon and submit. It works.

Version 1.1.0 added iPhone/iTouch support. But I still can’t get it to sumbit automatically when docked…

Ahem, the Chat application doesn’t run in the background according to what’s been posted so far.

http://gizmodo.com/365327/iphone-sdk-limitation-only-one-user+made-app-running-concurrently-no-background-processes

*submit

(sumbitch typo!)

There’s a workaround in place… check the audioscrobbler forums. You can run a “fake ipod dmg” to trick itunes into thinking that an ipod is attached, then sync your iphone, then eject the “fake ipod” dmg. audioscrobbler will then successfully sync from your most recently played list.

it works. definitely not elegant, but functional.

You can submit iPhone scrobbles to Last.fm via iScrobbler, just not directly. At this point, iScrobbler does not recognize a mounted iPhone. However, there is a work-around–

1. Sync your iPhone

2. Disconnect iPhone

3. Sync iPod (even if you haven’t listened to music on it)

4. While iPod is mounted, update iPod.

iScrobbler does not collect its data from your iPod; it collects its data from the “Recently Played Tracks” playlist. Syncing your iPhone will add tracks to this playlist, and having your iPod mounted will allow iScrobbler to work its magic.

I am the owner of the Last.fm iPhone group.

Check us out– http://www.last.fm/group/iPhone