Last.fm subscribers have the ability to edit their scrobbles, i.e. to update the title, artist, album or album artist of a scrobble. This can only be done using Last.fm website UI, at the time of writing there is no Last.fm API method for editing scrobbles.
lfmedit.sh and lfmbatchedit.sh allow sending scrobble edit requests from the
command line, which makes it possible to automate the editing process.
bashcurljq- Last.fm subscription
Only an authenticated Last.fm subscriber is authorized to edit scrobbles. The scripts mimic the behavior of the website sending edit requests to Last.fm backend, so they require the same set of authentication tokens:
- Last.fm username
- session ID
- CSRF token
The username is not a problem, but obtaining the other two tokens is not as
straightforward. Session ID and CSRF token are created at login and stored in
browser cookies. It's possible to get them using the browser developer console
(F12 in Firefox or Chrome). Copy the values of cookies sessionid and csrftoken,
and set the relevant variables in lfmedit/auth_tokens in your user's config
directory. See the sample file for details.
The parameter -u is mandatory because Last.fm seems to be using the Unix timestamp
as scrobble ID. Apart from the timestamp, it's only required to set options
corresponding to fields you want to change - in this example only the title and
artist are modified, the album stays the same. Note that the album artist (last
column) was automatically changed to match the new track artist.
It is possible to remove information (e.g. passing -b "" will remove album field
from the scrobble), but it's not allowed to remove artist or title.
Each line in scrobbles.txt begins with a + character. It is immediately followed by
the Unix timestamp, then by target title, artist and album separated by tabs. Successful
and failed edits are logged to appropriate files. The switch -Y disables asking for edit
confirmation. Run the scripts with -h switch to get the full list of supported options.
lfmedit.shis not very useful, in a way it's just a development version oflfmbatchedit.sh- One of the mandatory parameters of scrobble edit request is the original album
artist. It is not possible to get that piece of information from Last.fm API. The
scripts try to make an assumption, but there is no guarantee it will be correct.
If
lfmedit.shmakes a wrong assumption which causes an edit to fail, it's possible to override it using-Zcommand line option. - "Unknown Date" scrobbles cannot be edited. This is a consequence of getting original scrobble data from the API: the timestamps of these scrobbles are artificial and not unique, so original scrobble data cannot be retrieved by timestamp query.
- Edit verification is not very reliable - I've seen both false positives and false
negatives in my testing. For this reason verification is disabled by default. It
can be enabled using
-Voption. - It's slow. For each scrobble edit the script sends one Last.fm API request to get
original scrobble data, then a POST request to edit the scrobble, and another POST
request to verify the edit. This involves spawning several
curlandjqprocesses, plus the network overhead also plays a role.lfmbatchedit.shsends edit requests sequentially, and sometimes Last.fm is slow to respond. Furthermore, at some time between May 2022 and May 2023 Last.fm implemented rate limiting, which required adding delays tolfmbatchedit.shto avoid throttling.
None. At least not in this repo.
This was supposed to be a quick-and-dirty proof of concept, and this is the reason it was initially written in Bash. As the handling of errors and edge cases grew more complex, I realised this needs to be rewritten in a different programming language. I intend to do that when I find more time.
If any bugs are reported I'll look into fixing them, but I don't want to add more features to Bash implementation.