Happy news for Last.fm scrobblers. Now if you’ve deleted some artist or composer from your profile, you can restore it via the Last.fm scrobble restore tool.
“Being in charge of the database that stores everyone’s scrobbles is a great responsibility and one I don’t take lightly,” explained self-proclaimed Last.fm ‘Scrobble Overlord’ Ricky Cormier (aka ‘evilrix’) on his blog on Tuesday. “One thing that I get asked now and again is, ‘I’ve accidentally deleted Artist X from my profile, can you restore it please’?”
“Well, the simple answer is, ‘yes I can’ but up until now I’ve not had anything that allows it to be done with the click of a button or two. I decided enough was enough and the result is this Playground app.”
For those not initiated into the wonderful world of scrobbling, it’s basically a means by which you can communicate your musical preferences to Last.fm. You automatically scrobble to Last when you pick and choose songs and composers on the site. But you can also download Last’s scrobbler application, which will allow you to convey to Last your iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, and Foobar 2000 tunes.
Cormier explains scrobbling and this new restore app further.
“When you delete anything from your library we don’t actually delete it, we move it to a different table in your database. We need to do this so we can keep track of what you’ve deleted to make sure we don’t keep offering it to you as a recommendation.
All this Playground app does is allow you to review what’s in your deleted tracks table and if you choose to restore them it just puts them back into your main scrobble table.”
The Last.fm scrobbler is a determined little sucker. If you’re playing music offline, it will cache the tracks and convey them to Last.fm when you reconnect to cyberspace (developers: the Scrobble API is explained here).
But this news is also yet another reminder to us that what we do online doesn’t necessarily go away, even if we press a “delete” button, an ongoingly unnerving revelation, at least for me.
On the other hand,
“Please note that this tool cannot be used to restore a deleted or wiped profile as can be found in the account settings … ” Cormier adds, “where erase really means just that!”
What a relief.
