How to Scrobble Vinyl, CDs and Cassettes to Last.fm with Shelfify

Connect Last.fm in Shelfify

One-time setup, takes about a minute. Open Settings in Shelfify, tap Connect Last.fm, sign in with your Last.fm account, and authorize the connection. Once that's done, every release detail page in the app has a scrobble button waiting.

If you haven't connected Discogs yet, do that first. Shelfify uses your Discogs account both to import your collection and to resolve releases that aren't in it. Both connections are OAuth, so no password leaves Last.fm or Discogs.

Scrobble a record from your collection

This is the everyday case. You put a record on, you want it on your charts.

Open Shelfify, find the record (search by title, browse the shelf, or use the random picker), and tap into its detail page. The scrobble button is right there. One tap and the entire tracklist goes to Last.fm with the correct artist, album and track titles, in the right order.

Because the metadata comes straight from Discogs, your scrobbles merge cleanly into your existing Last.fm artist and album pages, instead of creating duplicates with slightly different spellings.

Scrobble anything on Discogs, even if you don't own it

Scrobbling isn't limited to records in your collection. A friend brings over a record. You're at someone's place and they put on an album you've never heard. You borrow a CD for the weekend. None of these are on your shelves, but they're almost certainly on Discogs.

Search Discogs from inside Shelfify, open the release, and the same scrobble button is right there. Nothing gets added to your collection or your shelves, the scrobble just goes straight to Last.fm with the correct metadata. So you can scrobble anything you actually listen to, not just what you own.

Whole album or single track

Sometimes you put a record on and listen to the whole thing. Sometimes you just play track 3 because that's the one you wanted. Shelfify lets you scrobble either way:

• Tap the album-level scrobble button to scrobble the entire tracklist at once.
• Tap an individual track in the tracklist to scrobble just that one.

When you scrobble a whole album, Shelfify doesn't dump every track into Last.fm with the same timestamp. Each track is scrobbled with a timestamp based on its actual length, so the album appears on your profile as if you listened to it in real time, in order, the way you actually would have. Track 1 first, then track 2 starting after track 1's runtime, and so on. From Last.fm's side it looks the same as if you'd been streaming the album.

What this looks like after a few weeks

After a couple of weeks, the workflow stops feeling like a workflow. Drop the needle, pick up the phone, tap the record, tap scrobble, put the phone down. It takes about as long as choosing the record in the first place.

And by the end of the month your Last.fm charts actually reflect what you've been listening to, instead of being 95 percent streaming and a complete blank for the hours you spent on the couch with a record on. That's the whole point.