Totally Gonna Blog About This

Dear Lifehacker,
Last.fm has announced that they’re getting rid of some streaming services in November. What other streaming services can replace these features, and how can I continue scrobbling their songs to Last.fm?

Sincerely,

Losing Last.fm

Dear Losing,

It is a bummer that Last.fm is losing certain subscriber streaming services, namely the ability to stream your loved tracks, playlists, and personal tags. Sadly, music licensing is pretty difficult for a lot of these guys, so the landscape is always changing. Luckily, the best part about Last.fm is not just the streaming, its the ability to “scrobble” all those songs, as well as songs played in desktop music players, to be organized and counted in your personal Last.fm statistics.

If you’d like to continue scratching your online radio itch but don’t want to lose the ability to scrobble those songs, you’re in luck—most other popular streaming services have third-party workarounds that scrobble to Last.fm. Here, we’ll go through a few of your choices for streaming services, and mention a few ways you can scrobble their tracks to the Last.fm service.

Grooveshark

Like we said, the online radio scene is constantly changing—even our recent Hive Five on the topic seems a little out of date, what with Lala shutting down. Luckily, the winner of that Hive Five, Grooveshark, is still one of the best services out there, especially if you like to have more of a say in what you listen to. While it does have a recommendation engine, it also allows you to create custom playlists from their huge library of music, and even upload your own music if the artist or track you want isn’t available. And, it has built-in, official Last.fm scrobbling to boot. The only catch is you need to be a VIP subscriber to scrobble—but if you were a Last.fm subscriber, it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to downgrade your Last.fm account to free and get a premium Grooveshark account.

Pandora

Trusty ol’ Pandora’s been around for awhile, and it’s still one of the best and most widely used recommendation-based streamers around. It doesn’t have quite as many features as the other services, including the Last.fm features that got shut down—you can’t really choose what songs you listen to or create any playlists, but with the power of the Music Genome Project behind it, you’re sure to like whatever it churns out.

The other big benefit of Pandora is that, as one of the most popular and long-standing streamers, it has quite a few options for scrobbling to Last.fm. Previously mentioned PandoraFM and the Last.fm Firefox extension both scrobble your Pandora tracks beautifully. If you prefer a desktop experience, previously mentionedPandoraJam is a fantastic Mac client for Pandora that will not only scrobble to Last.fm, but update your IM status, stream to AirPort Express, and record tracks to iTunes (albeit low-bitrate tracks). Windows users looking to scrobble Pandora from the desktop can use OpenPandora, while Linux users can try out Pithos.

Slacker Radio

Slacker Radio hasn’t been popular quite as long as the others, but it seems to be gaining quite a bit of traction. Slacker has a very neat set-up, allowing you to customize your streaming radio station with a few different options, from a very simple Pandora-like experience to defining your station by popularity and era to choosing how often your favorite artists and tracks are mixed into the stream. Slacker has fewer scrobbling options, but the aforementioned Last.fm Firefox Extension will work with Slacker on the desktop.

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The biggest downside to all this is that, unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as if there are a lot of options for scrobbling Pandora, Slacker, and other streaming services from their mobile apps. So, as of right now, you’ll only be able to scrobble from the desktop, but it’s better than nothing—Last.fm does have a pretty nice API, so as these mobile apps become more popular, we hope that they (or some clever third-party developers) find ways to bring those features to our smartphones. Until then, enjoy!

Sincerely,

Lifehacker

P.S. As always, we’ve presented just a few of the many options out there. Grooveshark, Pandora, and Slacker are some of the most popular streaming services around, and as such they have pretty good Last.fm integration options available. That said, if you have a favorite streaming service or know of a scrobbling solution we missed, sound off in the comments!

via lifehacker.com