last.fm users have limited choices for scrobbling their song plays from an Android device.
Scrobbling involves transmitting the meta data for all of the music tracks you play to your last.fm account, from where you build a comprehensive of all the tracks you’ve ever played, as well as make use of the service’s peerless music discovery features. Sounds simple, but scrobbling is surprisingly underrepresented on the platform given last.fm’s nearly 60 million users.
Spotify has it built-in, but is the only one of the major streaming apps to do so (Deezer has it on the desktop but not in the app). The official last.fm app works with some third party music players but hasn’t had a meaningful update since the Gingerbread days, while Simple Last.fm Scrobbler—the best option up until now—has very patchy performance and a tendency to stop working altogether.
WAIL is a new app on the Play Store that is very lightweight and seems to be able to scrobble from virtually any third party app or streaming service. It’s early days, and the app is still in beta, but with zero configuration, a more modern look than its rivals, and a welcome lack of obtrusive permissions the signs are encouraging.
Based on our tests it works perfectly with Google Play Music, and seems to work very well with Rdio. Double scrobbles have always been a problem with third party scrobblers, and we had a few issues with Deezer. Again, though, it should be remembered that WAIL is in beta.
How to scrobble with WAIL
One of the best things about WAIL is that is requires basically no setup. Just install the app and enter your login details and it will automatically detect when you are playing music.
Incidentally, if you’ve got Spotify installed with last.fm syncing already configured within the app WAIL will leave Spotify to do the scrobbling.
The main screen shows which track you’re currently playing, and it also reports this in real time to last.fm so the Now Playing display is updated.
Swipe open the navigation sidebar and select Tracks to see your recent scrobbling history. There’s some options in that sidebar too, though they still need tidying up and you can leave them on their defaults anyway.
WAIL is available now for free from the Play Store.
[wp-review]
Download: WAIL Beta — last.fm scrobbler