The past few months, I’ve noticed that only a fraction of the music I’ve been playing has been scrobbling on last.fm. But I just put this down to general last.fm flakiness — I think everybody pretty much assumes that they’re closing any time soon after the last disasterous redesign (where all the useful functionality disappeared (but we got a mobile-friendly design)).
But last night I noticed something:
The only things that scrobbled were tracks I’ve ripped from vinyl! The only things that didn’t scrobble were tracks ripped from CDs! So I traced the Emacs scrobble library and saw that the only difference was that with CD tracks, scrobble.el sent over the CDDB ID when scrobbling, and with vinyl tracks, it naturally didn’t. Because no such data existed.
I commented out the CDDB ID stuff, and then everything started scrobbling perfectly.
When I send over API calls with the CDDB ID set, no errors are reported, but the scrobbles are silently discarded later, and do not show up in the library.
So… A bug introduced during the redesign or something? I don’t know. Since that data is superfluous, anyway, it’s no big deal. And since last.fm is probably closing, nothing matters.
Boo hoo.
I’m apparently part of the Tilda Swinton Underground now, where we swap rare, unavailable Tilda Swinton TV series and shorts.
Or something. In any case, I got a copy of this 1986 British TV series from a kind reader. It’s rather good. Bits of it are brilliant. And some bits, er, aren’t. Have a peek here.
If you happen to have stuff that I’ve been unable to find (marked on this page with “-“), please let me know at larsi@gnus.org.
I did some stats on the effect of the number of contributors after Emacs switched to git last May. I think I summed it up as “meh”, but that was only after a handful of months, after all.
It’s now been more than a year, so I redid the experiment:
(The red line is the changeover point from bzr to git.)
Let’s zoom in on the last few years:
I think my original conclusion stands.