Spotify scrobbling with their desktop app not working

[shoegazessb]

Spotify scrobbling with their desktop app not working

[SHOEGAZEssb]

Could you try if it works with the prerelease 1.17 found here: #36

[hans-juergen]

I tried it with v1.17 (which still says "1.16" in the header), but got the same error message in Current Status when scrobbling my Discover Weekly playlist. Album cover, track, artist and album title are correct though.

After a while (about 5 tracks) the window does not update anymore with new tracks, I have to reconnect to Spotify to get it started again.

[SHOEGAZEssb]

Weird, the header says 1.17 for me. Are you sure you've overwritten the old files correctly? I recommend deleting the old scrubbler before using the new one.

[hans-juergen]

OK, I was sure that I had overwritten the *.exe file yesterday with the usual "extract all" option of Windows 10, because I checked the file date which said 09.05.2018. But for some odd reason it obviously still was v1.16. After deleting all files in the Scrubbler subfolder and extracting again, I could start v1.17 (had to use admin rights though, or it would not create hjbardenhagen.db in the Debug folder).

Anyhow, now I'm scrobbling while streaming with the Spotify desktop client 1.0.80 (just got updated automatically) and no other scrobbler active (no Last.fm beta scrobbling, no internal Spotify scrobbling). Next check will be my local files.

[hans-juergen]

Hmm, some bad news: scrobbling while streaming already stopped after 3 songs like yesterday. The Scrubbler is stuck showing me the third song while still being connected to Spotify, or at least it thinks so. Trying to reconnect gives this error: "Fatal error connecting to Spotify: Der Remote-Server hat einen Fehler zurückgegeben: (503) Server nicht verfügbar."

So maybe it is caused by temporary problems with the Spotify Web API. It might also have to do with Spotify ads which cause an interruption, so the Scrubbler cannot automatically continue after an ad. This just happened after another two tracks followed by an ad or rather three ads in a row, so they took about 90 seconds or more in total (timeout?). This time reconnecting worked, and scrobbling continued with the current song.

Another ad with only 30 seconds caused scrobbling to stop. Reconnecting worked again, scrobbling continued (Scrobble-Meter jumps into current track no matter if it is already running and scrobbles it).

[SHOEGAZEssb]

I have used Spotify scrobbling recently and it actually worked quite well, but I have no ads so that might be the problem. I will have to investigate further, thanks for the information so far

[hans-juergen]

OK, third time that a single ad of 30 seconds causes a stop in scrobbling. As reconnecting always works, maybe you should simply implement an automatic reconnect after one or more ads.

Concerning the Spotify API, Jon posted yesterday that many Last.fm users had enabled the new feature in Applications, so there was a temporary problem handling these many requests.

Now I'm scrobbling my local files which also works except for not recognising the album (no cover image, no album title), like you already reported on Reddit. Last.fm's autocorrection seems to add the correct thumbnail in my Recent Tracks list though, so it is not that critical. My library also misses the album info for the scrobble then.

[SHOEGAZEssb]

Yea, unfortunately the spotify api does not communicate local album information for whatever reason :/

[hans-juergen]

I noticed recently that you cannot click on artist or album in your local files anymore (all greyed out now) which was still possible not long ago. So they seem to have changed something not only in the desktop client, but in general.

I think the browser extension Last.fm web scrobbler uses Last.fm's database instead when it cannot find album info for the current track. Furthermore you can also edit the scrobble before it gets submitted, so you could add album info manually at least or edit a spelling error.

I have scrobbled local files for more than 6 hours without any ad, so there were no problems with it. I don't know if playing local tracks in Spotify even has ads for free accounts, because I usually do not use it for that, but at least Premium accounts should be able to scrobble local files continuously.

[SHOEGAZEssb]

As far as I can tell this seems to be a bug in the spotify api wrapper I am using. Because I actually do check for ads, but apparently the ad detection of the api wrapper is broken (already reported)

[hans-juergen]

I see, as far as I remember there was a similar problem with Spotify ads stopping playback when the Spotify Player on Last.fm was new. Hopefully they can fix their wrapper, as the Scrubbler could be a good alternative for users who do not like the new Last.fm feature of Spotify scrobbling. If you also add iPod scrobbling, you could probably earn money with it. ;-)

[SHOEGAZEssb]

Have you tried it with Scrubbler 1.17? Does it still behave weird when a Spotify ad plays?

[hans-juergen]

It stops scrobbling after each Spotify ad, but clicking on Reconnect resumes the scrobbling of the current track, so it is the same behaviour as before.

[TheNightmareRider]

I got Spotify premium yesterday. And now the scrubbler won't connect on desktop. What happened?

[SHOEGAZEssb]

The local spotify scrobbling is dead at the moment. Read this for further information: JohnnyCrazy/SpotifyAPI-NET#254